Copyright

This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

First published in the USA in 2019 by Bantam Books,

an imprint of Random House,

a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Copyright © Dean Koontz 2019

Cover design layout © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photographs © Stephen Carroll / Trevillion Images

Dean Koontz asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008291396

Ebook Edition © December 2018 ISBN: 9780008291433

Version: 2019-05-22

Dedication

To Gerda,

who is my Jane

In memory of Ruth Ebner, also known as Pepper, who was not just a faithful reader but also an advocate of my work and much loved by her many friends

Epigraph

Creating a neural [brain] lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines.

—ELON MUSK

Ain’t it strange the way we’re ignorant

How we seek out bad advice

How we jigger it and figure it

Mistaking value for the price

—PAUL SIMON, “So Beautiful or So What?”

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

PART ONE: Sucker Punch

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

PART TWO: Bad Weather

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

PART THREE: Storm Troopers

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

PART FOUR: No Escape

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

PART FIVE: Jane in Chains

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

PART SIX: Free Will

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By Dean Koontz

About the Publisher

PART ONE

1

The triple-pane floor-to-ceiling windows of Hollister’s study frame the rising plain to the west, the foothills, and the distant Rocky Mountains that were long ago born from the earth in cataclysm, now dark and majestic against a sullen sky. It is a view to match the man who stands at this wall of glass. The word cataclysm is a synonym for disaster or upheaval but also for revolution, and he is the leader of the greatest revolution in history. The greatest and the last. The end of history is near, after which his vision of a pacified world will endure forever.

Meanwhile, there are mundane tasks to perform, obligations to address. For one thing, there is someone who needs to be killed.

In a few hours, when a late-season storm descends on these high plains east of Denver, the hunt will begin, and one of two men will die at the hands of the other, a fact Wainwright Warwick Hollister finds neither exhilarating nor frightening. Of profound importance to Hollister is that he avoid the character weaknesses of his father, Orenthal Hollister, and at all times comport himself in a more formidable and responsible manner than had his old man. Among other things, this means that when someone needs to be eliminated, the killing can’t always be done by a hireling. If a man is too finicky to get blood on his hands once in a while, or if he lacks the courage to put himself at physical risk, then he can’t claim to be a leader in this world of wolves, nor even a member of the pack, but is instead only a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

The hunt will occur here, on Crystal Creek Ranch, Hollister’s twelve-thousand-acre spread, unto itself a world of pine forests and rolling meadows. The chase will not be fair, because Hollister does not believe in fairness, which exists nowhere either in nature or in the human sphere. Fairness is an illusion of the weak and ignorant; it is the insincere promise made by those who manipulate the masses for gain.

The quarry, however, will have a chance to survive. A very slim one, but a chance. Although Hollister’s father, Orenthal, had been a powerful man physically as well as financially, his heart had been that of a coward. If ever he had decided that he couldn’t farm out all the violence required for the furtherance of his business, if he’d seen the moral need for every prince to be also a warrior, he wouldn’t have given the quarry any chance whatsoever. The hunt would have been an empty ritual with only one possible end: the triumph of Orenthal and the death of his prey.

Now the security system, which always knows Hollister’s location in this forty-six-thousand-square-foot residence, speaks in a soft, feminine voice. “Thomas Buckle has arrived in the library.”

Thomas Buckle is a houseguest from L.A. The sole passenger on Hollister’s Gulfstream V, he landed two hours earlier, at eleven o’clock this morning, on Crystal Creek’s six-thousand-foot airstrip, was driven 1.6 miles from the hangar to the main house in a Rolls-Royce Phantom, and settled in a guest suite on the main floor.

He will most likely be dead by dawn.

The house is a sleek ultramodern masterpiece of native stone, glass, and stainless steel, with floors of limestone on which ornately figured antique Persian carpets float like lush warm islands on a cold pale sea.

The library contains twenty-five thousand volumes that Hollister inherited from his father. The old man was a lifelong reader of novels. But his son has no use for fiction. Wainwright Warwick Hollister is a realist from his epidermis to his marrow. Orenthal also read many works of philosophy, forever searching for the meaning of life. His son has no use for philosophy because he already knows the two words that give life its meaning: money and power. Only money and power can defend against the chaos of this world and ensure a life of pleasure. Those people whom he can’t buy, Hollister can destroy. People are tools, unless they decline to be used, whereupon they become merely obstructions that must be broken and quickly swept aside—or eliminated entirely.

With no need for his father’s books, he had considered donating the collection to a charity or university but instead moved them to this place as a reminder of the old man’s fatal weakness.

Now, at one o’clock, as Hollister enters the library, Thomas Buckle turns from the shelves and says, “What a magnificent collection. First editions of everything from Ray Bradbury to Tom Wolfe. Hammett and Hemingway. Stark and Steinbeck. Such eclectic taste.”

Buckle is twenty-six, handsome enough to be an actor, though he dreams of a career as a famous film director. He has already made two low-budget movies acclaimed by some critics, but box-office success has eluded him. He is at a crucial juncture, an ambitious young man of considerable talent whose philosophy and vision are at odds with the common wisdom that currently prevails in Hollywood, which he has begun to discover will limit his opportunities.

He has come here in response to a personal phone call from Wainwright Hollister, who expressed admiration for the young man’s work and a desire to discuss a business proposal involving film production. This is a lie. However, as people are tools, so lies are nothing more than the various grips that one must apply to make them perform as wanted.

Upon the director’s arrival, Hollister had briefly greeted him; now there is no need for the formalities of introduction. A smile is all he requires when he says, “Perhaps you would like to select one of these novels that’s never been filmed and make it our first project together.”

Although he is the least sentimental of men and although he has no capacity for the more tender emotions, Wainwright Hollister is graced with a broad, almost supernaturally pleasant face that can produce a smile with as many charming permutations as that of any courtesan in history, and he can use it to bewitch both women and men. They see compassion when in fact he regards them with icy contempt, see mercy when they should see cruelty, see humility when he views them with condescension. He is universally thought to be a most amiable man with a singular capacity for friendship, though in his heart he views everyone as a stranger too unknowable ever to be a friend. He uses his supple, glorious smile as if it were a farmer’s seeding machine, planting kernels of deceit deep in everyone he meets.

Having been flown to Colorado in high style and having been treated like a prodigal son, Thomas Buckle takes seriously the offer to select any book in this library to translate to film. He looks around wonderingly at the shelves of material. “Oh, well, I sure wouldn’t want to make that choice lightly, sir. I’d want to have a better idea of what’s here.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to pore through the collection later,” Hollister lies. “Let’s have lunch. And please dispense with the ‘sir.’ I haven’t been knighted. Just call me Wayne. ‘Wainwright’ is a mouthful, and ‘Warwick’ sounds like the villain in some superhero movie.”

Thomas Buckle is an honest young man. His father is a tailor, a salaried employee of a dry-cleaning shop, and his mother works as a department store seamstress. Although his parents struggled to contribute to his film school tuition, Thomas paid for most of it, having worked part-time jobs since his freshman year in high school. On his two movies, he cut his fees for writing and directing, in order to increase the budget for actors and scene setups. He’s too naïve to realize that his producing partner on those projects cleverly siphoned off some of the studio’s money, which Hollister discovered from the exhaustive investigation he commissioned of Buckle’s affairs. As the child of honest people, as an earnest artist and a striver in the all-American tradition, the young man has an abundance of hope and determination, but a serious deficit of street smarts; much to learn and no time left to learn it.

As they make their way from the library to the dining room, Tom Buckle can’t restrain himself from commenting on the grandeur of the house and the high pedigree of the paintings on the walls—Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst … He is a poor boy enchanted by Hollister’s great wealth, much as the sorcerer’s apprentice might be captivated by the mystery of his master during the first day on the job.

There is no envy in his manner, no evidence of greed. Rather, as a filmmaker, he is besotted with the visuals. The drama of the house appeals to him as a story setting, and he is spinning some private narrative in his mind. Perhaps he imagines a biographical film of his own life, with this scene as the turning point between failure and phenomenal success.

Hollister enjoys answering questions about the architecture and the art, telling anecdotes of construction and acquisition. Only when he senses Tom Buckle has been drawn into his host’s orbit, and then with great calculation, does Hollister put one arm around the young director’s shoulders in the manner of a doting uncle.

This familiarity is received without the slightest stiffening or surprise. Honest men from honest families are at a disadvantage in this world of lies. The poor fool is as good as dead already.

2

The wisdom of millennia and numerous cultures was stacked on a grid maze of shelves flanking dimly lighted aisles in which no one searched for knowledge, all as quiet as an undiscovered pharaoh’s tomb in a pyramid drifted over by a thousand feet of sand.

That first Friday in April, Jane Hawk was ensconced in a library in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles, using one of the public-access workstations that were nestled in a computer alcove, which currently offered the only action in the building. Because every computer featured a GPS locater, as did smartphones and electronic tablets and laptops, she carried none of those things. Although the authorities searching for her knew she used library computers, on this occasion she avoided websites they might expect to be of interest to her. Consequently, she was relatively secure in the conviction that none of her probes would trigger a track-to-source security program and pinpoint her location.

In her effort to expose a cabal of totalitarians at the highest echelons of government and private industry, she’d repeatedly zeroed in on a person who appeared to be at the point of the pyramid, only to discover each time that the true numero uno was someone else still cloaked in mystery. Recently, she had been urgently working with those names, all wealthy individuals, seeking connections among them. She had found one: a very public commitment to philanthropy, perhaps because being seen to have a charitable nature could be cover for dark intentions.

Although there were tens of thousands of charities they could have chosen, the people she knew to be near the top of this cabal served on the boards of many of the same nonprofits. And the one whose name was most often associated with theirs, Wainwright Warwick Hollister, a new figure to her, happened to be the wealthiest of them all.

In a conspiracy this radical, this bent on transforming America—indeed the world—the supreme leader, the self-appointed intellectual who inspired the loyalty of others, did not necessarily have to be the one with the most money. A fanatical passion for change and dominance might lift a man of modest means to that position.

However, Hollister, a megabillionaire, had a generously funded foundation of his own, and the deeper she probed into it, the more curious and suspicious it seemed.

Wainwright Hollister’s foundation, ostensibly formed to support cancer research, had made significant donations to a nonprofit under the control of Dr. Bertold Shenneck, the genius who had conceived of, developed, and refined the nanotech brain implant that made possible the cabal’s quest for absolute power. Bingo.

Many people using a computer or smartphone became so distracted that they ceased to be aware of what happened in the world around them and were in Condition White, one of the four Cooper Color Codes describing levels of situational awareness. After earning a college degree in forensic psychology in three years, after eighteen weeks of training at Quantico, and after having served as an FBI agent for six years before going rogue, Jane was perpetually in Condition Yellow: relaxed but alert, aware, not in expectation of an attack, but never oblivious of significant events around her.

Continuous situational awareness was necessary to avoid being cast abruptly into Condition Red, with a genuine threat imminent.

Between yellow and red was Condition Orange, when an aware and alert person recognized something strange or wrong in a situation, a potential threat looming. In this case, through peripheral vision, she realized that a man who’d entered after her and settled at one of the other computers was spending considerably more time watching her than the screen before him.

Maybe he was staring at her just because he liked the way she looked. She had considerable experience of men’s admiration.

Her own hair concealed by an excellent shaggy-cut ash-blond wig, blue eyes made gray by contact lenses, a fake mole the size of a pea attached to her upper lip with spirit gum, wearing a little too much makeup and Smashbox lipstick, she was deep in her Leslie Anderson identity. Because she looked younger than she was and wore a pair of stage-prop glasses with bright red frames, she could be mistaken for a studious college girl. She never behaved in a furtive or nervous manner, as the most-wanted fugitive on the FBI list might be expected to do, but called attention to herself in subtle ways—yawning, stretching, muttering at the computer screen—and chatted up anyone who spoke to her. She was confident that no average citizen would easily see through Leslie Anderson and recognize the wanted woman whom the media called “the beautiful monster.”

However, the guy kept staring at her. Twice when she casually glanced in his direction, he quickly looked away, pretending to be absorbed in the data on his screen.

His genetic roots were in the subcontinent of India. Caramel skin, black hair, large dark eyes. Perhaps thirty pounds overweight. A pleasant, round face. Maybe twenty-five. Dressed in khakis and a yellow pullover.

He didn’t fit the profile of someone in law enforcement or that of an intelligence-agency spook. Nevertheless, he made her uneasy. More than uneasy. She never dismissed the still, small voice of intuition that had so often kept her alive.

So, Condition Orange. Two options: engage or evade. The second was nearly always the better choice, as the first was more likely to lead to Condition Red and a violent confrontation.

Jane backed out of the website she had been exploring, wiped the browsing history, clicked off the computer, picked up her tote, and walked out of the alcove.

As she moved toward the front desk, she glanced back. The plump man was standing, holding something in one hand, at his side, so she couldn’t identify it, and watching her as he spoke into his phone.

When she opened the door at the main entrance, she saw another man standing by her metallic-gray Ford Explorer Sport in the public parking lot, talking on his phone. Tall, lean, dressed all in black, he was too distant for her to see his face. But on this mild sunny day, his knee-length raincoat might have been worn to conceal a sawed-off shotgun or maybe a Taser XREP 12-gauge that could deliver an electronic projectile and a disabling shock from a distance of a hundred feet. He looked as real as death and yet phantasmal, like an assassin who had slipped through a rent in the cosmic fabric between this world and another, on some mystical mission.

The Explorer, a stolen vehicle, had been scrubbed of its former identity in Mexico, given a purpose-built 700-horsepower 502 Chevy engine, and purchased from a reliable black-market dealer in Nogales, Arizona, who didn’t keep records. There seemed to be no way it could have been tied to her.

Instead of stepping outside, she closed the door and turned to her right and made her way through the shelves of books. The aisles weren’t a maze to her, because she had scouted the place when she arrived, before settling at the computer.

An EXIT sign marked a door to a back hallway that was fragrant with fresh-brewed coffee. Offices. Storerooms. An open refreshments niche with a refrigerator. A short hall intersected the longer one, and at the end, another door opened out to a small staff-parking area with an alleyway beyond.

Three cars and a Chevy Tahoe had occupied this back lot when she’d checked it earlier.

Now, in addition to those vehicles, a white Cadillac Escalade stood in the fifth of seven spaces, to the west of the library’s rear door. The woman in the driver’s seat of the Caddy had the same caramel complexion and black hair as the man at the computer. She had a phone to her ear and was speaking to someone, which didn’t prove complicity in a plot, though her eyes fixed on Jane like a shooter’s eyes on a target.

In any crisis situation, the most important thing to do was get off the X, move, because if you weren’t moving away from the threat, someone with bad intentions was for damn sure moving closer to you.

Avoiding the Escalade, Jane went east. Along the north side of the alley, shadows of two-, three-, and four-story buildings painted a pattern like castle crenellations on the pavement, and she stayed in that shade for what little cover it provided, moving quickly past Dumpsters standing sentinel. To the south, past the library, there was a park, and beyond the park a kindergarten with a fenced playground.

She was opposite the park, where phoenix palms rustled in a light breeze and swayed their shadows on the grass, when the tall man in the raincoat appeared as if conjured, coming toward her, not running, in no hurry, as though it was ordained that she was his to take at will.

The structures to her left housed businesses, the names of which were emblazoned on the back doors: a gift shop, a restaurant, a stationery store, another restaurant. The buildings in that block shared walls, so there were no service passages between enterprises.

When a sedan pulled into the east end of the alley and angled to a stop, serving as a barricade, Jane didn’t bother to look behind herself, because she had no doubt the Escalade had likewise blocked the west end of the alleyway.

As she hurried along, she tried doors, and the third one—CLASSIC PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY—wasn’t locked. She went inside, where a series of small windows near the ceiling admitted enough light to reveal a combination receiving area and storage room.

The shelves were empty. When she turned to the alley door to engage the deadbolt, the lock was broken.

She’d been skillfully herded to this place. The previous tenant had moved out. She had walked into a trap.

3

The formal dining room, which seats twenty, isn’t intimate enough for the conversation that Wainwright Hollister intends to have with Thomas Buckle. They are served in the breakfast room, which is separated from the immense kitchen by a butler’s pantry.

A large Francis Bacon painting of smudges, whorls, and jagged lines is the only painting in the twenty-foot-square chamber, a work of alarming dislocations that hangs opposite the ordered vista of nature—groves of evergreens and undulant meadows—visible beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows.

They sit at the stainless-steel and cast-glass table. Buckle faces the windows, so the immense and lonely nature of the ranch will be impressed upon him by the time he learns that he is to be hunted to the death in that cold vastness. Hollister faces the young director and the painting behind him, for the art of Francis Bacon reflects his view of human society as chaotic, confirms his belief in the need to impose order by brute power and extreme violence.

The chef, Andre, is busy in the kitchen. Lovely Mai-Mai serves them, beginning with an icy glass of pinot grigio and small plates of Andre’s Parmesan crisps. She wears a verbena fragrance as subtle as the mere memory of a scent.

Tom Buckle is clearly charmed by the girl’s beauty and grace. However, the almost comic awkwardness with which he tries to engage her in conversation as she performs her duties has less to do with sexual attraction than with the fact that he is out of his element, the son of a tailor and a seamstress, abashed by the splendor of the wealth all around him and uncertain how to behave with the staff of such a great house. He chats up Mai-Mai as if she were a waitress in a restaurant.

Because she’s well trained, the very ideal of a servant, Mai-Mai is polite but not familiar, at all times smiling but properly distant.

When the two men are alone, Hollister raises his glass in a toast. “To a great adventure together.”

He is amused to see that Buckle rises an inch or two off his chair, intending to get up and lean across the table in order to clink glasses with his host. But at once the director realizes that the width of the table will make this maneuver awkward, that he should take his cue from Hollister and remain seated. He pretends to have been merely adjusting his position in the chair as he says, “To a great adventure.”

After they taste the superb wine, Wainwright Hollister says, “I am prepared to invest six hundred million in a slate of films, but not in a partnership with a traditional studio, where I’m certain the bookkeeping would leave me with a return far under one percent or no return at all.” He is lying, but his singular smile could sell ice to Eskimos or apostasy to the pope.

Although Buckle surely knows that he’s in the presence of a man who thinks big and is worth twenty billion dollars, he is all but struck speechless by the figure his lunch companion has mentioned. “Well … that is … you could … a very valuable catalog of films could be created for that much money.”

Hollister nods agreement. “Exactly—if we avoid the outrageous budgets of the mindless special-effects extravaganzas that Hollywood churns out these days. What I have in mind, Tom, are exciting and intense and meaningful films of the kind you make, with budgets between twenty and sixty million per picture. Timeless stories that will speak to people as powerfully fifty years from now as they will on their initial release.”

Hollister raises his glass again in an unexpressed endorsement of his initial toast. Buckle takes the cue, raising his glass as well and then drinking with his host, a vision of cinematic glory shining in his eyes.

Leaning forward in his chair, with a genial warmth that he is able to summon as easily as a man with chronic bronchitis can cough up phlegm, Hollister says, “May I tell you a story, Tom, one that I think will make a wonderful motion picture?”

“Of course. Yes. I’d love to hear it.”

“Now, if you find it clichéd or jejune, you must be honest with me. Honesty between partners is essential.”

The word partners visibly heartens Buckle. “I couldn’t agree more, Wayne. But I want to hear it out to the end before I comment. I’ve got to understand the roundness of the concept.”

“Of course you know who Jane Hawk is.”

“Everyone knows who she is—top of the news for weeks.”

“Indicted for espionage, treason, murder,” Hollister recaps.

Buckle nods. “They now say she even murdered her husband, the hero Marine, that he didn’t commit suicide.”

Leaning forward a little more, cocking his head, Hollister speaks in a stage whisper. “What if it’s all lies?”

Buckle looks perplexed. “How can it all be lies? I mean—”

Holding up one hand to stop the young man, Hollister says, “Wait for the roundness of the concept.”

He leans back in his chair, pausing to enjoy one of the Parmesan crisps.

Buckle tries one as well. “These are delicious. I’ve never had anything quite like them. Perfect with this wine.”

“Andre, my chef,” Hollister says, “is an adjusted person. He is obsessed with food. He lives only to cook.”

If the term adjusted person strikes Thomas Buckle as odd, he gives no indication of puzzlement.

After a sip of wine, Hollister continues. “According to friends of hers, Jane became obsessed with proving her husband, Nick, didn’t commit suicide, that he was murdered, and when she took a leave of absence from the FBI, she devoted herself to investigating Nick’s death. On the other hand, authorities and media say she was merely putting up a good front to divert suspicion from her role in his death. We’re told she drugged him and got him into the bathtub and slit his throat, cutting his carotid artery with his Marine Ka-Bar knife in such a way that it looked to the coroner as if he’d taken his own life. But what if that’s all a lie?”

Buckle is intrigued. “What if is the essence of storytelling. So what if?”

Hollister continues with relish. “Jane told friends that in her research she found a fifteen-percent increase in suicides during the past few years, that all of it involved well-liked, stable people successful in their professions, happy in their relationships, none with a history of depression, people like her husband.”

“A few nights ago,” Tom Buckle says, “on that TV show Sunday Magazine, they did an hour about Hawk. They included experts who said the rate of suicide isn’t constant. It goes up, goes down. And all this about happy people killing themselves isn’t the case.”

“Remember my what-if, Tom. What if it’s all a lie, and some in the media are part of it? What if Jane Hawk is on to something, and they need to demonize her with false charges, silence her?”

“You see this as a conspiracy story.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, then, it sure would be a conspiracy of unprecedented proportions.”

“Unprecedented,” Hollister agrees. “Heroic. Involving thousands of powerful people in government and the private sector. Let’s say these conspirators called themselves … Techno Arcadians.”

“Arcadia. From ancient Greece. A place of peace, innocence, prosperity. Essentially Utopia.”

Hollister beams and claps his hands twice. “You are just the young man to understand my story.”

“But why ‘techno’?”

“Do you know what nanotechnology is, Tom?”

“Very tiny machines made up of a handful of atoms, or maybe molecules. They say it’s the future, with unlimited medical and industrial applications.”

“You are so cutting-edge,” Hollister declares and pushes a call button on the table leg. “When I saw your films, I said, ‘This is a guy on the cutting edge.’ I’m delighted to see I was right.”

In answer to the silent summons, Mai-Mai returns to freshen their wine and remove the empty plates that held the Parmesan crisps.

Thomas Buckle smiles at her and thanks her, but he seems to have intuited that the proper behavior in these circumstances is to treat her with reserve, not as if she were working at Olive Garden.

The entertainment business hasn’t coarsened him yet, for though Mai-Mai fascinates and attracts him, he watches her not with evident lust, but with an almost adolescent wistfulness and yearning.

When the two men are alone once more, Hollister says, “Let’s suppose these conspirators, these Techno Arcadians, have developed a nanomachine brain implant, a control mechanism, that makes complete puppets of the people in whom it’s installed. And the puppets don’t know what’s been done to them, don’t know they’re now … property.”

The director blinks, blinks, and a certain quiet excitement comes over him that has nothing to do with six hundred million dollars, that arises from his passion for filmmaking.

“So … central to the story would be the issue of free will. A conspiracy intent on subjugating all humanity, the death of freedom, a sort of technologically imposed slavery.”

Hollister grins like an amateur author thrilled that a real writer found merit in his scenario. “You like it so far?”

“I damn well do. I like it more by the minute. Even though Jane Hawk inspired the idea, we can’t say this is her story, so we’d have to change the character to maybe a CIA agent or something, make her a little older. Maybe it’s even a male lead. But one thing … why would anyone submit to having such a brain implant surgically installed?”

Leaning forward again, punctuating his revelation with a wink, Hollister speaks in a stage whisper. “No surgery required. You drug them or otherwise overpower them when they’re alone, and the implant is administered by injection.”

4

Jane Hawk hurried out of the storage room. Milky daylight spilled through a large sales area and curdled to gray in a hallway. Two doors stood open on each side of the hall, a shadowy bath and dark empty offices.

At the front of the store, two frosted-glass show windows each bore the words CLASSIC PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY painted in script, reversed from Jane’s perspective. Between the windows stood a door with a frosted inlay, and as she approached it, a man shape loomed beyond like a stalker emerging out of fog in a disturbing dream.

He must be one of them. She’d have to take him down to get to the street and away, but even if he was a mortal threat, she could not risk resorting to gunfire when there were sure to be pedestrians on the sidewalk.

The tall man in the raincoat might already be entering the back of the place from the alleyway.

Jane’s attention swung toward an interior door to her right, four panels of solid wood, no glass. If it was only a closet, she was cornered.

Instead, beyond lay stairs ascending into gloom. In nearly blinding darkness, she used the handrail to guard against a fall until she arrived at a landing. Another flight led up to a second landing where pale light issued from an open door.

Perhaps the photographer who had once run a business out of the ground floor had lived above his studio.

Considering that the people closing in on her seemed to have herded her into this building, one of them might be waiting in the second-floor apartment.

Her heart labored but didn’t race, for she was in the grip of dread rather than full-blown fright. If these were Arcadians—and who else could they be?—they were not going to kill her here. They were going to corner her, Taser her, chloroform her, and convey her to a secure facility where she could scream herself hoarse without being heard by anyone sympathetic to her plight.

Ultimately they were going to inject her with the neural lace that would web her brain and enslave her. Then they would drain from her the names of everyone who had been of assistance to her in this crusade and would insist upon knowing the whereabouts of her five-year-old son, Travis. When she was their obedient puppet, they would eventually instruct her to kill herself.

But not just herself. She knew these elitist creeps. She knew the icy coldness of their minds, the blackness of their hearts, the pure contempt with which they viewed those who did not share their misanthropic view of humanity and did not endorse their narcissism. They would relish cruel vengeance for the trouble she had caused them, for their comrades who had tried to murder her and had been killed instead. They would instruct her to torture her own child and slaughter him; only when he was brutally ravaged and dead would they tell her to kill herself. In the thrall of the nanoweb, with its filaments wound through her brain, she would be unable to resist even the most horrific of their commands.

Compared to injection, a quick death would be a mercy.

She put her tote beside the open door. Drew the Heckler & Koch Compact .45 from the rig under her sport coat. She hated clearing doorways in such situations, but there was no time to hesitate.

Pistol in a two-hand grip, leading with head and gun, low and fast, she crossed the threshold, stepped to the right, back against the wall, eyes on the Heckler’s front sight as she swept the room left to right.

Three windows facing the street. No blinds or drapes. Morning light slanting in under scalloped fabric awnings. No furniture. No carpeting on the hardwood floor. Nothing moved except a few dust balls stirred by the slight draft she’d made on entering.

An archway connected this room to others toward the back of the building, where darkness reigned, and there was a door on the right, ajar.

She held her breath and heard only silence. Both training and intuition argued that if someone was in the apartment with her, he would have made a move by now.

The silence was broken when a sound rose from below, perhaps someone ascending the stairs.

She returned to the apartment entrance to retrieve her tote. Among other things, it contained $90,000, all of which—and more—she had taken from the stashes of wealthy Arcadians who had tried and failed to kill her. She couldn’t afford to lose it; she was fighting a quiet war, but a war nonetheless, and wars cost money.

The building was old, and the stairs creaked under the weight of whoever was climbing them.

She closed the door. The deadbolt was intact. She engaged it.

5

Mai-Mai serves a small chopped salad sprinkled with pine nuts and crumbles of feta cheese.

Tom Buckle smiles and thanks her and watches her lithe form as she exits through the butler’s pantry.

When the girl is gone, Wainwright Hollister says, “I need to explain how an injectable brain implant might be feasible, Tom. I don’t want you to think of this as a science-fiction movie. It’s a thoroughly contemporary thriller.”

“I know a little about nanotech, Wayne, just enough to accept the premise.”

“Good. Very good. Now suppose hundreds of thousands of these microscopic constructs can be suspended in ampules of fluid and stored at temperatures between—oh, let’s say—thirty-six and fifty degrees, where they remain in stasis. When injected, the warmth of the blood gradually activates them. They’re brain-tropic. The veins conduct them to the heart, then the carotid and vertebral arteries bring them to the brain. Do you know what the blood-brain barrier is, Tom?”

Buckle evidently finds the salad highly agreeable and pauses to swallow a mouthful before saying, “I’ve heard of it, but I’m no whiz when it comes to medical matters.”

“Nor do you need to be. You’re an artist and a damn fine one. Ideas and emotions are the stuff of your work. So … the blood-brain barrier is a complex biological mechanism that allows vital substances in the blood to penetrate the walls of the brain’s numerous capillaries while keeping out harmful substances such as certain drugs. Let’s imagine these amazingly tiny nanoconstructs have been designed to pass through the blood-brain barrier, after which they assemble into a control mechanism in the brain.”

“Could they really self-assemble? I mean … many, many thousands of them?”

“An excellent question, Tom. We wouldn’t have a viable story if I didn’t have an answer!” Hollister pauses to enjoy his salad.

“It’s snowing.” Thomas Buckle points to the windows behind his host.

Hollister turns in his chair to watch the first snowflakes, the size of quarters and half dollars, spiraling out of the low clouds like some jackpot disgorged by a celestial slot machine.

Refocusing his attention on his guest, he says, “The forecast is for twelve inches. Temperature will drop to the low twenties by nightfall. No wind yet, but it’s coming. Winter lingers on these plains. Have you experienced a storm in territory such as this?”

“I’m a California boy. My experience of snow is entirely from TV and movies.”

Hollister nods. “If a man were on the run from a killer on a night like the one coming, his least concern might be his would-be assassin. The weather itself could be the deadlier foe.” Before Buckle might wonder at this odd statement, his host favors him with a beguiling smile. “I’ve got a story in mind for just such a movie. But before I bore you with a second scenario, let’s see if I can make my nano tale convincing to the end. You asked how these tiny constructs could be made to self-assemble in the brain. Have you heard the term ‘Brownian movement’?”

6

Jane was at the moment safe behind the locked door of the second-floor apartment, although not safe for long.

This was a two-story building, and like all the buildings on this block—whether two, three, or four stories—it had a flat roof with a low parapet. There would be an exit to the roof somewhere in these rooms, probably by way of a metal spiral staircase tucked into a service closet.

But she didn’t want to go up and out that way. If she got to the roof through a trapdoor or through a stairhead shed, she might discover that they had anticipated her and had stationed one of their own up there to greet her. Then she would have nowhere to go.

Even if no sonofabitch with an XREP Taser waited above, Jane didn’t fancy a wild flight across rooftops as in a James Bond flick. Although the buildings varied in height, they were contiguous, and she was likely to find service ladders bolted to walls to allow roof-maintenance men easy passage from one elevation to another. However, she’d already counted five agents in this operation, so there might be more. And if they had mounted a force of that size, they might also have a drone at their service.

She’d previously survived an encounter with two weaponized drones in a San Diego park, something similar to a DJI Inspire 1 Pro with a three-axis gimbaled camera. An eight- or ten-pound drone couldn’t be fitted with even a miniature belt feed loaded with .22-caliber rounds, because the recoil would destabilize the craft. But those in San Diego featured a low-recoil compressed-air weapon that fired needle-like quarrels perhaps containing a tranquilizer.

The people now closing in on her would not risk using such a drone on a busy suburban street in a commercial district, but they might keep one hovering above the roofs where, if she appeared, she could be at once dropped unconscious without much chance that anyone at street level would see the assault.

The prospect of a machine assailant gave her a deeper chill than did a thug with a Taser XREP 12-gauge, not necessarily for good reason, but because it seemed to herald a new world in which those people not enslaved by nanoweb neural lace would be policed and punished by robots incapable of empathy or mercy.

She went to the front windows of the apartment living room, which faced onto the street and offered her the best—the only—chance of escaping capture.

7

Sitting with his back to the windows, Hollister is so attuned to the moment, so looking forward to Tom Buckle’s sudden realization of his dire situation, so enthusiastic about the pending hunt, his senses so heightened that he can almost feel the huge snowflakes spiraling through the windless day behind his back, can almost hear those delicate wheels of crystal lace turning as they descend, can almost smell the blood that will form patterns in brilliant contrast across a canvas of snow.

“Brownian movement,” he explains, “is progress by random motion. It’s one of nature’s primary mechanisms, Tom. The easiest way to explain is with the example of ribosomes, those tiny mitten-shaped organelles that exist in enormous numbers in the cytoplasm of human cells. They manufacture proteins.”

When his host pauses for wine, Buckle appears to be dazzled when he says, “Man, you’ve really worked this story out in detail.”

Hollister can feel his blue eyes twinkling with merriment, and he knows his captivating smile has never served him better. “Only because I so very much want you to be part of this, to sign on for this adventure with me. Now, ribosomes. Each one has more than fifty different components. If you break down thousands of ribosomes into their individual components and thoroughly mix them in a suspending fluid, then they ricochet off the molecules of the suspending medium and keep knocking against one another until one by one the fifty-some parts come together like puzzle pieces and, amazingly, assemble into whole ribosomes again. That is Brownian movement. It works with Bertold Shenneck’s control mechanism because each of the components is designed to fit in only one place, so the puzzle can’t assemble incorrectly.”

“‘Shenneck’?” Buckle asks.

Hollister should not have mentioned Shenneck, who had in fact invented the nanoweb implant. Now he covers his slip of the tongue. “As I was working this out, I needed to name some characters. That’s just what I call the scientist who developed the nanoweb implant.”

“It’s a good name for the character, but …” The director frowns. “It sounds a little familiar. We should check it out, make sure there’s not a prominent Bertold Shenneck out there anywhere.”

Hollister dismisses the issue with a wave of one hand. “I’m not wedded to the name. Not at all. You’re better than I am at this.”

Having finished his salad, the director blots his mouth on his napkin. “So how long does it take this brain implant to assemble once it’s been injected?”

“Maybe eight or ten hours with the first-generation implant, but the device will be improved, so it might be brought down to, say, four hours. The subject has no memory of being restrained and injected. Once the control mechanism is in place, his mind can be accessed with a key phrase like ‘Play Manchurian with me.’ Once accessed, he’ll do anything he’s told to do—and think he’s acting of his own volition.”

The key phrase delights Buckle. “That great Cold War movie about brainwashing. The Manchurian Candidate. John Frankenheimer directed from a Richard Condon novel. Sinatra and Laurence Harvey. Angela Lansbury as Harvey’s power-mad mother. About 1962, I think.”

“Shenneck liked his little jokes. The scientist character. Whatever we’re going to call him.”

“My head is swimming, Wayne, but in a good way. I’m really getting into the whole concept. But exactly how does this tie to Jane Hawk, where we started?”

Responding to the call button, Mai-Mai enters to remove the salad plates.

Hollister says, “Just imagine, Tom, that these Techno Arcadians are intent not only on repressing the unruly masses by injecting and controlling selected leaders in politics, religion, business, and the arts. They also want to prevent charismatic individuals with wrong ideas from influencing the culture.”

Tom smiles at Mai-Mai and then responds to his host. “What wrong ideas?”

“Any ideas in disagreement with Arcadian philosophy. Let’s say it’s been decided that controlling these charismatic types isn’t enough, that it’s necessary to remove their unique genomes from society, prevent them from propagating. So they receive a brain implant and are later directed to commit suicide.”

Tom Buckle nods. “Like Jane Hawk’s husband. But how would these people be chosen for elimination?”

“A computer model identifies them by their public statements, beliefs, accomplishments. Then they’re put on the Hamlet list.”

“‘Hamlet’? Why Hamlet?”

“The theory is that if someone had killed Hamlet in the first act, a lot more people would have been alive at the end.”

Frowning, Tom Buckle says, “For the movie, we’d probably have to call it something other than the Hamlet list. Anyway, how many people would be on this list?”

“Let’s imagine the computer model says that, in a country as large as ours, two hundred and ten thousand of the most charismatic potential leaders in each generation would have to be removed at the rate of eight thousand four hundred a year.”

“Mass murder. This is a very dark movie, Wayne.”

“To the Arcadians, it’s not murder. They think of it as culling from the herd any individuals with dangerous potential, a necessary step toward peace and stability.”

Mai-Mai returns with the entrée: sea bass, asparagus, and miniature buttered raviolis stuffed with mascarpone and red peppers.

Conversation throughout the main course focuses on what changes to make in the lead character and possible twists and turns in the story line. Hollister mentions the “whispering room,” a feature of the brain implants, by which adjusted people are able to communicate with one another via microwave transmission, brain to brain, as Elon Musk, of Tesla and Space X fame, has predicted will eventually be possible. They have the potential of forming a hive mind. The idea delights Buckle. Hollister enjoys this blue-sky session far more than he would if he were actually going to finance a motion picture.

Movies are terrible investments. Perhaps three out of ten make a profit. And there are countless ways that the distribution company can massage the box office numbers and pad the costs, so when there is a profit, much of it disappears.

However, Tom is bright and enthusiastic. Inventing this movie with him is a pleasure. The more the young man talks, the clearer it becomes that the computer model was right to put him on the Hamlet list, and it is good that he will be dead by dawn.

When Mai-Mai returns to remove their plates, Hollister says, “The time has come for you to do as we discussed.”

She meets his stare, and though she is submissive, she is also afraid. Her lips part as if she will speak, but instead of words, her voluptuous mouth produces only tremors.

As she stands beside her master’s chair, Hollister takes one of her hands in both of his, and he smiles reassuringly. He speaks to her as he might to a daughter. “It’s all right, child. It’s just a moment of performance art. You have always excelled as an artist. This is what you were born to do.”

Her fear abates. The tremor fades. She answers his smile with an affectionate smile of her own. She bends down to kiss his cheek.

Tom Buckle watches with evident perplexity. When Mai-Mai leaves the room with their plates, the filmmaker is at a loss for words and covers his uncertainty by taking a sip of wine and savoring it.

“I see you’re curious about Mai-Mai,” Hollister says.

“No, not at all,” Buckle demurs. “It’s none of my business.”

“In fact, Tom, it’s the essence of your business here. Mai-Mai is twenty-seven, a year older than you, an exceptional woman.”

Tom glances toward the swinging door through which Mai-Mai left the room. “She’s quite beautiful.”

“Quite,” Hollister echoes. “She’s also supremely talented. Her paintings redefine realism. They’re stunning. By the time she was twenty-two, she’d won numerous awards. By the time she was twenty-four, her work was represented by the most prestigious galleries. She broke new ground as well by combining several of her larger paintings with a unique form of performance art that began to draw enthusiastic crowds.”

“Does she still paint?”

“Oh, yes. Better than ever. Magnificent images exquisitely rendered.”

“Then why …”

“Why is she here serving us lunch?”

“I can’t help but wonder.”

“She creates paintings but doesn’t sell them anymore.”

“You sure know how to build mystery, Wayne.”

Hollister smiles. “I’ve intrigued you, have I?”

“Greatly. I’d love to see these paintings.”

“You can’t. After she finishes a new canvas, she destroys it.”

Bafflement creases Tom Buckle’s brow. “Whyever would she do such a thing?”

“Because she’s an adjusted person. She made the list.”

This incident with Mai-Mai has disoriented Tom just enough so that the word list has no immediate meaning for him.

“The Hamlet list,” Hollister explains.

Puzzlement gives way to misunderstanding, and Tom smiles. “You give one hell of a pitch meeting, Wayne. And she’s quite an actress.”

“She’s not an actress,” Hollister assures him. “She’s just an obedient little bitch. She destroys them because I tell her to.”

Just then Tom Buckle’s gaze shifts from his host to the wall of glass behind him. “What on earth …?” Tom rises from his chair.

Wainwright Hollister gets to his feet as well and turns to the window.

Mai-Mai stands naked on the terrace, in the swiftly falling snow, facing them and smiling serenely, seeming more mystical than real.

“Her body is as perfect as her face,” says Hollister, “but one can grow tired even of such perfection. I’ve had enough of her.”

A scarlet silk scarf drapes Mai-Mai’s right hand. It slides to the snow-carpeted terrace, revealing a pistol.

“Performance art,” Tom Buckle tells himself, for he is both confused and in denial.

Soundlessly snow falls and falls, cascades of white petals, as Mai-Mai puts the barrel of the gun in her mouth and seems to breathe out the dragon fire of muzzle flash, seems to fold to the terrace in slow motion, the flowerfall of snow settling silently on her silent corpse.

8

Jane raised the lower sash of a double-hung window.

A foot below the windowsill, running nearly the width of the building, a five-foot-wide cantilevered marquee overhung the public sidewalk, the front of it bearing the name of the closed photography studio.

She dropped her tote onto the lid of the marquee and followed it through the window.

The entire block was from the Art Deco period, and each of the shared-wall buildings had its own stylized marquee, each separated from the next by a two-foot-wide gap. Jane hurried eastward, sprang from that first projection onto a second, from the second onto a third.

With the tote slung over her left shoulder, she knelt on the edge of the third marquee, facing the building, gripped the decorative masonry cornice, and slid backward into empty air, hanging by her hands for a moment before dropping to the sidewalk.

She startled an old guy in a tam-o’-shanter and walking with a three-footed cane. “Pretty girls falling from the sky!” he declared. “These are days of miracles and wonder.”

In the drop, her tote had slid off her arm. She snared it from the sidewalk.

“If only I were fifty years younger,” he said.

Jane said, “If only I were fifty years older,” kissed him on the cheek, stepped between two parked cars, and dodged across three lanes of traffic.

From the farther side of the street, she looked back and saw the man in the dark raincoat at the open window through which she had exited the building, and below him another man venturing forth from the recessed entryway to the former photography studio. They both had spotted her.

At the corner, she turned north, out of their sight. Ahead, a thirtysomething guy was preparing to climb onto a fully chromed Harley Road King cruiser. His open-face helmet boasted an American flag decal. She hoped it meant something to him.

Breathless, she said, “Give a girl a ride?”

He didn’t look her up and down as men usually did, only met her eyes. “Where you going?”

“Anywhere but here. And fast.”

“Cops or not cops?”

She had to give him something to win cooperation. “Maybe they carry a badge, but it’s bogus.”

As he swung aboard the saddle, he said, “Climb on and hold tight.”

She sat just forward of the saddlebags, tote straps over one shoulder, arms around him.

The motor was hopped up, with the distinct sound of Screamin’ Eagle pistons and cylinders.

Jane glanced over her shoulder. One of her pursuers turned the corner.

The Road King shot away from the curb.

9

The sky unseen behind the raveling white skeins with which it cocooned the world, and on the terrace Mai-Mai’s once lovely form stiffening under a crystalline lacework …

This side of the windows, Tom Buckle repeats, “Performance art,” though the artist is not going to stand up, bloodied and brainless, to take a bow.

Adam, Brad, and Carl, the three most senior members of the ranch’s eighteen-man security force, who once had other names and personalities and real lives, enter the breakfast room. They are dressed in black, with the Crystal Creek Ranch logo in white stitching on the breast pockets of their shirts.

Although Tom Buckle still regards the suicide of Mai-Mai with stunned disbelief, he at once responds to these three men with fear and alarm, as well he should. They have the intensity of wolves on the hunt, and though their stares are as sharp as filleting knives, there is a deadness in their eyes that implies, quite accurately, that they are as coldhearted as machines.

“Tom,” Hollister says in a tone of voice that suggests nothing out of the ordinary has occurred, “do you remember the name of the brainwashed assassin in The Manchurian Candidate?”

Tom eases away from the newcomers. “What is this? What the hell is happening here?”

In answer to his own question, Hollister says, “His name was Raymond Shaw. Specimens like these three”—he gestures toward the security agents—“we call rayshaws. One word. Lowercase r. They’re adjusted people, injected with a control mechanism. But this nanoweb is different from those administered to Mai-Mai and Nick Hawk and others on the Hamlet list. This version scrubs away their memories, every last one, deconstructs their personalities, and programs them to be bodyguards who, without hesitation, will give their lives for their master. I am their master, Tom, and if I tell them to kill you, they will do so with extreme prejudice.”

The film director eases away from the rayshaws until he backs into a sideboard. He is physically rigid, but there is no doubt he’s reeling mentally and emotionally.

“Your work has earned you a place on the Hamlet list, Tom, and therefore a death sentence.”

The filmmaker dares to look away from the rayshaws and meet his host’s eyes. Although he is a screenwriter as well as a director, he is at a loss for words, perhaps struggling to make sense of this bizarre turn of events and plug it into a dramatic structure that promises him a triumphant resolution.

“I could order these men to subdue you and inject you and send you back to California with no knowledge of anything that has occurred here.”

Wainwright Hollister rounds the end of the table, approaching Tom Buckle.

“Do you know Roger and Jennifer Boseman?”

As if shell-shocked, Tom says, “What?”

“Roger and Jennifer Boseman?”

“They live next to me, neighbors, next door.”

“Their daughter Kaylee, ten years old. She’s quite a beautiful child. After you’re injected, adjusted, and sent home, if I call you in a few weeks and instruct you to kidnap Kaylee, rape her, torture her, kill her, and then kill yourself … you will obey.”

He comes face-to-face with his guest.

“After that outrage, the two acclaimed films you’ve made will be judged the work of a monster, withdrawn from distribution in all formats, never to be seen again. Whatever small effect you’ve thus far had on the culture will be erased.”

The director finally accepts what he desperately doesn’t want to believe. “Dear God, it’s real. The nanoweb, the injections, the enslavement.”

“Yes. But ‘enslavement’ is the wrong word, Tom. Most human beings are impetuous, imprudent, ignorant, given to superstition and other irrational behavior. They’re maladjusted. For their own sake and to preserve this fragile planet, we merely intend to adjust them.”

“You’re insane.”

“No, Tom. I’m the clearest-thinking person you’ll ever meet. I have no illusions about the meaning of life.”

Hollister favors the younger man with a kindly smile worthy of a country doctor in a painting by Norman Rockwell.

“I’m also a man of profound convictions. I don’t always leave the dirty work to others. Sometimes I do the adjusting myself. The adjusting or, as in your case, the extermination. But I am also a fair man, Tom. In the contest to come, you will have a chance to survive.”

As though inspired by countless moments of movie heroics, Tom Buckle throws a punch, but as ineptly as a supporting character who is playing a fool. Hollister blocks the blow with a forearm, seizes Buckle’s wrist, twists that arm up behind the man’s back, and shoves him hard. The director staggers into the window wall and slaps both palms against the glass to stop himself from crashing through.

To the rayshaws, Hollister says, “Mr. Buckle needs to be suited up and instructed as to the rules of the hunt.”

Just then the first wind of the storm invades the terrace, and the scarlet silk scarf, which once covered Mai-Mai’s pistol, billows off the snow-skinned flagstones and undulates six or seven feet above her corpse, as though it is her very spirit, risen from her hushed and cooling heart.

10

The twin-cam engine, maybe 95ci, gave the bike true zip. The driver worked the five-speed transmission with finesse and took hard corners with the confidence of a Star Wars character piloting an antigravity sled.

After an almost twenty-minute ride, he slowed in a residential neighborhood in a part of the valley far enough north that it didn’t qualify as a Los Angeles suburb. The houses were old, the properties large, the trees tall and plentiful, live oaks and eucalyptuses and all kinds of palms, some of them long left untrimmed.

He pulled into a driveway that ran alongside a meticulously maintained bungalow with craftsman details. The place was shaded by immense, well-kept phoenix palms.

At the back of the property stood a separate garage with three double-wide doors, one of which rose as the Harley approached. The driver coasted under the up-folding panels, stopped in the garage, killed the engine, and put down the kickstand.

Jane had been expecting him to drop her miles from where they started, but in a public place. Evidently he had brought her home instead. The three garage bays were deep and open to one another, housing a well-equipped machine shop and a number of motorcycles.

Wary not so much because he’d brought her here of all places, but because the world in its dark ways had woven wariness through her bones, she got off the Road King, alert for trouble.

He removed his helmet, put it on the bike seat, stripped off his driving gloves, combed his thick hair with one hand. Wide-set malachite eyes. Clean, strong features. The suggestion that a smile was imminent.

Jane said, “Thanks for the lift.”

He cocked his head to study her.

“But where are we, and how far do I have to hike to get a bus?”

A low growl drew her attention. An enormous dog stood at the open garage door. A mastiff with an apricot-fawn coat, black face, and sooted ears.

Mastiffs had a reputation as aggressive, which they weren’t—unless trained to be.

Her rescuer finally spoke. “You leaned in all the way, never tensed no matter how radical the rake.”

“I’ve ridden before.”

“Ridden or driven?”

“Both.”

Indicating the glowering dog, his master said, “Sparky’s harmless. No bark, no bite.”

“No wag, either.”

“Give him time. Maybe old Sparky knows you’re carrying a concealed weapon.”

“How would he know that?”

“Maybe the cut of your sport coat.”

“Your dog has street smarts.”

“Also, when you were holding tight and leaning in, I felt it against my back.”

She shrugged. “It’s a dangerous world. A girl’s got to look out for herself.”

“Too true. Anyway, I’ve got a solid bike for you.”

“I didn’t know I was in the market for one.”

“You were on foot, so they must’ve made your car.”

“‘They’?”

“The guys with bogus badges.”

“You brought me all the way here to sell me a bike?”

“I didn’t say sell.”

“I’m not going to work for it.”

“Stay cool. I’m way married. My wife’s in the house right now. She saw us drive up. Anyway, she’s all I need.”

Jane put down the tote bag to have both hands free. She glanced toward the house. Maybe the wife existed, maybe she didn’t. If she existed, perhaps she was insurance against an attempted assault—or maybe she was cool with rape and would even assist her husband. Jane had once taken down a serial killer whose wife charmed his targets into a sense of safety so they could be easily abducted; she cooked elaborate meals for the girls during the weeks that her husband used them, brought fresh flowers to their windowless basement prison, and assisted in the disposal of their broken bodies after hubby wearied of them. She said she did it because she loved him so much.

“Name’s Garret. Garret Nolan.”

“I’m Leslie Anderson,” she lied.

His face finally formed the smile that had been pending. There was a knowing quality to it, which disturbed Jane.

The mastiff had entered the garage. He intently sniffed her shoes as though to map the journey that had brought her here.

Garret Nolan went to a wall switch and clicked on the lights in all six vehicle stalls. “Racers, street cruisers, touring bikes. I break them down, build them better, customize them. If you need to get all the way to the Canadian border, you’ll want a bagger.”

From the Canadian border reference, she inferred that he had assumed more about her status as a fugitive than she’d given him reason to deduce. She felt the skin crepe on the back of her neck.

“I have two Road Kings,” he continued, “rebuilt slick, but I’ve got too much in them just to give them away. What I can give you is this 2012 Big Dog Bulldog Bagger, which I was going to tear down next. It’s a righteous bike.”

“You don’t have to give me anything. I have money. I can pay.”

“I won’t take your money. The Big Dog has a lot of miles on it, but it’s in good shape. I’ve ridden it myself. You don’t need it flashed up with Performance Machine wheels, Kuryakyn mufflers, and all the rest. It’s a reliable beast of burden and won’t call undue attention. Test ride it around the neighborhood. You like it, take it. There isn’t a license plate, but you could maybe go a couple thousand miles before a cop might notice.”

She stared at him in silence until his lingering half smile flatlined. Then she said, “I ask for a ride out of a tight spot, and you want to give me a bike. What’s this about, Mr. Nolan?”

He shrugged. “I believe you. I want to help.”

“Believe me about what?”

“That you’re innocent.”

“I never said I was innocent. Anyway … innocent of what?”

He was a big guy, about six feet two and solid, with an air of rough experience about him, and yet he suddenly seemed as shy as a boy, looking down at his shoes to avoid meeting her eyes.

“Innocent of what?” she pressed.

He gazed through the open door, at the house shaded by phoenix palms, at the still cascades of fronds in the warm, breathless day.

She waited, and when he looked at her again, he said, “That’s a bitchin’ disguise, but seeing through disguises was part of my job. You’re her. You’re Jane Hawk.”

11

Sparky, the mastiff, sniffed along the zipper of the tote bag, as though trained to locate the banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills that, among other things, it contained.

“If I were Hawk,” Jane said, “maybe it wouldn’t be smart of you to say so to my face. Half the world hunting her down, she must be one crazy desperate bitch.”

Garret Nolan smiled again. “I won’t say what service I was in. We did black-ops work in Mexico and Central America, no uniforms, we went native. Our actions targeted MS-13, other gangs, those linked to nests of Iranian operatives in Venezuela, Argentina, Nicaragua.”

He turned his back on her and went to a square of perfboard beside a workbench and took a set of keys from one of the pegs.

“We knew who we were looking for—names, faces—but a lot of the time they changed their appearance. This funny thing happens when you use facial-recognition programs to see through disguises. When you do it long enough, often enough, it’s as if your brain uploads a little of the software, so you develop an eye for a masquerade, no matter how well it’s done.”

When he returned to her, he held out the keys, which she didn’t at once accept.

“Another problem you have is you’re a damn good-looking woman.”

“If I were Hawk, what should I do—scar myself?”

“Women as good-looking as you rarely use so much makeup and eye shadow, such bright lipstick. If it can’t improve the face, maybe it’s meant to obscure it.”

“That’s all you’ve got?”

“The mole on the upper lip. Why haven’t you had it removed?”

“I’m skittish about doctors and scalpels.”

“Fake moles, fake port-wine birthmarks, fake tattoos—they’re popular camouflage. I don’t need a scalpel. Bet I could remove it with a little spirit-gum solvent.”

“Leslie Anderson,” she insisted. “Born in Portland, late of Vegas, got myself in trouble when I jacked five thousand credit-card numbers that my hacker boss had stolen, went into business for myself, running a buy-and-fence operation, until he found me.”

Nolan still held out the keys. “The color-changing contact lens on your left eye isn’t fitted properly. There’s a thin crescent of blue above the gray. Jane Hawk has blue eyes.”

She remembered how, on first meeting him, he had not looked her up and down, but had stared intently into her eyes.

“The ash-blond wig is the best, tightly fitted for action,” he said. “But if the color was natural, your skin would probably be paler. With your complexion, your hair’s more likely to be honey blond—like Jane Hawk’s.”

She took the keys from him. “I don’t have to be Jane Hawk to need the bike. But if you’re hot on giving it to Leslie Anderson—”

“‘—born in Portland, late of Vegas,’” he said. “Another thing is how you move. Spine straight, shoulders back, athletic, quick and confident. That’s how she moves in what film they have of her.”

“Mama Anderson taught her girl not to slouch.”

“Then there’s the fact the media says Jane Hawk took part in some terrorist attack in Borrego Springs three days ago, maybe a hundred dead, maybe a lot more than that. They say she’s still somewhere in Southern California.”

“If I were her,” Jane said, “I’d be long gone from the state.”

Denied the chance to investigate the tote’s contents, the mastiff grumbled with disappointment when Jane picked up the bag.

“I really can pay for this,” she said.

“Then what would I have to brag on when you’re vindicated?”

She stowed the tote in one of the bike’s saddlebags. “Let’s say I’m her. Why would you do this?”

“From my days in … the service, I know how deeply the enemies of freedom have penetrated this country’s institutions, public and private sector. The way they’re demonizing you, their viciousness and ferocity, tells me you’re right about the plague of suicides, and somehow it’s … engineered.”

“I haven’t heard Hawk says it’s engineered.”

“Maybe because nobody’s given her a chance. Digital technology and biotech—somehow they have to be part of this.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

He said, “People are dazzled by high tech, but there’s a dark side, dark and darker. What horror isn’t possible today … it’ll be possible tomorrow.”

“Or maybe it is, after all, possible today,” she said.

12

The three rayshaws were of a physical type, big men with thick necks and broad shoulders and sledgehammer fists, their eyes cold, their stares as impersonal as camera lenses, as if they were not of women born, but instead were immortal archetypes of violence, risen from some infernal realm millennia earlier, having come down the centuries on a mission of barbarity, cruelty, and murder.

They escorted Tom Buckle to the guest suite where he’d left his baggage. Nothing he said could engender a response. They spoke to him only to tell him what he must do. They didn’t overtly threaten him; mortal threat was implicit in their every look and action.

Items that didn’t belong to him had been placed on the bed: long underwear, a flannel shirt, a Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suit by Hard Corps, two different kinds of socks, supple-looking gloves. Beside the bed stood a pair of boots.

“Strip naked,” one of the men commanded. “Dress in those things.”

Tom recognized the futility of appealing to these creatures’ common humanity, for there was nothing human about them other than their form. Their faces varied, but their expressions were eerily the same, as neutral as the masks of mannequins. No emotion shaped their features. Their faces lacked evidence of personality, and they seemed as remote and ghastly as the pale whiteness of the moon in daylight.

Wainwright Hollister’s movie was in fact reality, and Tom Buckle was the doomed lead in a noir thriller where the theme was meant to be the hopelessness of hoping. He was Edmond O’Brien in D.O.A. Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past.

Watching him undress, the three men said nothing.

He obeyed them. He could do nothing but obey. He believed Hollister’s assertion that they were killing machines.

For twenty-six years, he had lived a relatively charmed life, on a glide path into film directing. He’d never known terror until now. He was terrified not only of these creatures and of Hollister, but also by a sudden sense that a sinkhole might open in his psyche, a sucking black madness from which there could be no escape.

As Tom dressed in the storm suit, Mai-Mai’s suicide played in his memory so vividly that the room around him seemed to darkle like a theater where all the light was contained within the screen: her exquisite face, her beautiful body, she a symbol of mystical power, as if she were a goddess who stepped down from a heretofore unknown pantheon, the scene remembered in black-white-gray, as though from a movie made in the 1930s, but for the scarlet silk scarf that slid off her hand and the muzzle flash of the pistol, her collapsing with an awful grace, her seeming power revealed as an illusion, removed from this world with as little concern as Hollister might give to a cockroach before stamping on it.

The room was warm, but Tom felt as cold as the snow-swept world beyond the windows. His heart drummed with fear, but there was anger in it, too, an icy rage that scared him. He had never been an angry man. He worried that his fury might compel him to do something that would diminish his already slim chance of survival.

When he was suited and booted, with the hood snug around his face, the three men led him into the vast garage, where Hollister maintained a collection of expensive, exotic vehicles: a Lamborghini Huracán, a Rolls-Royce Phantom, a Bugatti Chiron, an armored Gurkha by Terradyne, and maybe twenty others. A showroom-tile floor. A pin spot highlighting each set of wheels.

They took him to a Hennessey VelociRaptor 6 × 6, which was a bespoke version of a Ford F-150 Raptor, a jacked-up six-wheel crew-cab truck with numerous upgrades. The driver sat alone in the front. The other two rayshaws flanked their prisoner in the backseat, so that Tom felt wedged between the jaws of a vise.

As they drove into the gray light and spiraling snow showers of the late afternoon, the hulk to Tom’s right recited the simple rules of the hunt. The quarry would be given a two-hour lead. On foot, he could head in any direction that he wished—except that he must not attempt to return to the residence. Security sensors would be aware of his approach well before he drew near the house, and he would be cut down by Crystal Creek Ranch personnel with Uzis.

“Adjusted people,” Tom said, still struggling to believe what ample evidence proved to be true.

His instructor’s facial features remained as graven as cemetery granite, his stare chisel sharp but shallow. “The quarry will be armed with a nine-millimeter Glock featuring a ten-round magazine.” Neither he nor the other men used Tom’s name or even once referred to him with the pronoun you.

The rayshaw produced the gun, sans ammunition, and briefly explained its features.

Tom owned a pistol with which he practiced, at most, once a year. The other three hundred and sixty-four days, the weapon was in the back of his nightstand drawer. He had no illusions about being a good marksman.

His instructor gave him the Glock. “The magazine and ammunition will be provided upon arrival at the starting position of the hunt. The quarry will also receive six PowerBars for energy, as well as a tactical flashlight.”

“A map,” Tom said. “A map and a compass.”

None of the three men responded.

Snow raveled now in countless skeins through the loom of the day and formed a pristine fabric on the land.

“Hollister said I’d have a fair chance.” There was no evidence that they had heard him. Nevertheless, he said. “What’s fair about this? Nothing. Nothing’s fair about it.”

His own voice embarrassed him, sounded like the whining of a coddled child. He fell silent.

The VelociRaptor grumbled into the growing storm and the slowly dimming day, flakes like midget moths swarming through the beams of the headlights. They had turned off the blacktop that linked the residence to the distant airplane hangar housing the Gulfstream V, and seemed to be following a dirt track difficult to discern under thin shifting scarves of snow.

Fifteen or twenty minutes from the house, the truck came to a stop. The men flanking Tom opened the back doors and got out.

When he hesitated to follow, one of them said, “Now,” putting such menace into one word that Tom at once obeyed.

13

In Garret Nolan’s garage, Jane straddled the motorcycle, flexed her hands around the grips, looking it over—speedometer/tachometer, clutch lever, brake lever, throttle—getting the feel of the machine before putting up the kickstand.

Nolan said, “One more thing you should know. They say Jane Hawk avoids bus stations, train stations, and airports because facial-recognition programs scan travelers for known terrorists and wanted criminals. But that’s not good enough anymore.”

Jane was curious, but Leslie Anderson was on the run only from her former boss, not from the feds, so neither of them expressed interest in what Nolan had said.

“About a year ago,” he continued, “the Chinese government began deploying among their police departments these freaky damn eyeglass-mounted cameras equipped with face-rec tech. Now some of my buddies still in U.S. spec ops recently received the same gear.”

Six months earlier, Jane would have taken such a claim with the entire contents of a salt shaker. Fixed-camera recognition systems were connected to remote facial databases stored in the cloud, so vast they—along with artificial-intelligence analytics—couldn’t be loaded onto the front end of a wearable camera. But technology was advancing at a remarkable pace, especially the tech that could be used for population control and oppression.

“These sunglasses are wired to a handheld device with an offline facial database of up to ten thousand faces,” Nolan said. “The AI is good enough to match a suspect’s face to one in the d-base in just six hundred milliseconds. Fixed cameras have limited lines of sight, but someone wearing these can look everywhere.”

She couldn’t restrain herself from saying, “That sucks.”

Nolan said, “If this gear is being issued to some in the military, you can bet your ass security agencies on the domestic side also have them. So maybe if you ever happen to run into Jane Hawk someday, tell her the one face currently sure to be in that portable d-base is hers. Nowhere is safe.”

“Has anywhere ever been?”

From the seat of a nearby Harley, he picked up a pearl-white Shoei X-9 Air helmet with a dark-smoke shield. “Too bad you can’t wear this everywhere.”

Accepting the helmet, Jane said, “What if they nail me and trace this bike back to you?”

“They can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Ever since I left the military, I’ve been doing business in ways that move me step by step toward the edge of the grid.”

“Gonna go all the way off?”

“Sooner than later, we’ll sell the house and head so far up-country you’d think it was the nineteenth century.”

“Sorry to hear that,” she said. “The more people like you and your wife who get out of the game, the more likely the bastards will win in the end.”

He shrugged. “We’ve got one life, and we don’t want to live any part of it on our knees, which is likely if we stay here.”

14

The two rayshaws walked Tom to the front of the VelociRaptor and about another forty feet through the vehicle’s lances of light before halting. One of them gave him the unloaded pistol. The other put a plastic sack with a drawstring closure on the ground at his feet.

They returned to the truck and boarded it. The vehicle hung a U-turn and drove away, taillights tinting the snow with a suggestion of blood as it dwindled into the white cascades.

Although Tom stood shaking, he was warm enough in his storm suit.

He stooped to open the bag with the drawstrings. It contained the promised PowerBars and a knitted ski mask that he could wear under the storm-suit hood, with holes only for his eyes and mouth. There were also the promised tactical flashlight, the magazine for the Glock, and ten bullets.

He inserted the ammunition into the magazine, the magazine into the pistol, the pistol into a zippered pocket on the thigh of the storm suit’s right leg. He distributed the knitwear and six PowerBars in other pockets.

Maybe the drawstring bag would come in handy. He’d keep it and, until nightfall, carry the flashlight in it.

As he closed the bag, the Bell and Howell Tac Light clinked against something he hadn’t noticed. He fished inside and came up with a microcassette recorder.

When Tom pressed PLAY, Wainwright Hollister spoke to him. “You will die in this lonely place, Tom Buckle. If you’d been injected, adjusted, and sent back to California, at least you’d have had the pleasure of a fleeting orgasm when you raped ten-year-old Kaylee at my command. But although there will be no pleasure for you in the hours ahead, you’ll be blamed for Kaylee’s kidnapping a few days from now, because when her body is found in your home, it will bear your semen and your blood, which we will harvest from you after your death. The world will know you as a monster, Tom, and everyone will despise your films. You will be sought by police but, of course, never found. Who can say how many rapes and murders of other little girls will be attributed to Tom Buckle, the phantom pedophile, in years to come? Please don’t use the nine-millimeter Glock to kill yourself. I’m so looking forward to the hunt and the moment when I remove the threat to a stable future posed by your dangerous ideas and undeniable talent. Get moving, Tom. You have only a two-hour lead.”

Whether the recording was intended to be a psychological weapon that would unnerve Tom and make him easier prey or signified nothing more than the billionaire’s narcissism and cruelty, Hollister had provided his quarry with precious evidence of the murder that he intended to commit and of the Arcadian conspiracy in which he was a key player. Instead of depressing or unnerving Tom, the recording brought the light of hope into his heart and warmed him with the realization that Hollister wasn’t as prudent or smart as he had seemed in the context of his magnificent house and the company of his zombie guards.

He rewound the message and pressed PLAY again, intending to listen only to the threat of the first sentence, so that it might inspire him to escape or put up a hell of a fight if confrontation proved unavoidable. The recorder hissed slightly louder than the descending flakes that softly sheered the air, hissed and hissed, but the words it had conveyed had been erased, evidently even as they had first issued from the speaker.

The meadows were clotted with old snow and silvered with fresh, but he felt as if he stood on a burnt plain, in a world scourged by an apocalyptic fire, the pine woods in the distance as black as columns of char, the current storm an ashfall, the incinerated sky in slow collapse, the unseen sun not merely in decline but dying in the wake of a nova flare.

He could almost believe he was asleep, all this a dreamscape of a world in the wake of judgment. The insanity of the Arcadian scheme and the suddenness with which he’d been plunged into mortal peril merely because his talent put him on a list of undesirables seemed too fantastic to be other than a nightmare that would dissolve when he thrust up from his pillow and threw back the covers and switched on a bedside lamp.

Although he’d never known such cold as this, the day abruptly grew colder when the early stillness of the storm was swept away by a sudden wind out of the northwest. The snowflakes that had kissed his face now nipped. Wind stung his eyes, and tears blurred his vision.

15

Because she was riding a bike much different from the one on which she had sped away with Garret Nolan, Jane risked cruising to the motel, a one-star enterprise trying to pass for a two, where she had left her luggage the previous night.

Her locked suitcases contained nothing irreplaceable. However, because of the urgency of the investigation she’d undertaken and the ever-growing intensity of the search for her, she didn’t have time to go clothes shopping or visit the source in Reseda from whom she obtained guns, driver’s licenses in multiple identities, license plates, color-changing contact lenses, wigs, and other items that were essential to the chameleon changes that kept her free and alive.

They had apparently tied the Ford Explorer Sport to her; but that didn’t mean they knew where her lodgings were. In fact, if they knew, they wouldn’t have come after her in the library, but would have been lying in wait in the motel room when she returned.

If she could safely retrieve her bags, so much the better.

The entire San Fernando Valley had once been a thriving part of the California dream; but some communities were now in decline. The almost third-world shabbiness of this neighborhood belied the Golden State’s image of high style and glamour that was barely sustained by the grace and beauty of the better coastal towns. Potholed streets, littered and unkempt parks, used hypodermic needles glittering in the gutters, graffiti, public urination, and homeless people camped in the doorways of vacant buildings were testament to corrupt and incompetent governance.

The Counting Sheep Motel was a mom-and-pop operation, cracked white stucco with blue trim, sixteen units on two levels encircling a courtyard with a swimming pool. The pool was small, its coping fissured and stained; a mermaid and her adoring entourage of cartoon fish were painted on the bottom, shimmering under water that seemed not quite as clear as it ought to be.

Jane’s room—number three—was on the ground floor, at the front of the building. There was no sign of unusual activity.

She rode to the end of the block, turned right, curbed the Big Dog, and fed coins to the parking meter.

After taking the tote from one of the saddlebags, she walked back to a bar and grill called Lucky O’Hara’s, across the street from the motel. She took her helmet off only as she reached the entrance. In addition to the name of the establishment, the sign above the door featured a pot of gold and a leprechaun.

Assuming Lucky O’Hara had earlier enjoyed a lunchtime rush, now at three thirty-five the crowd had gone. Two retirees sat at the horseshoe bar, each alone, one of them in low conversation with the bartender. A young couple engaged in an intense discussion in one of the booths that lined both side walls. The tables at the front of the room were not occupied. Jane sat at a window table for two, with a clear view of the motel that stood across the street and somewhat west of her position.

If the owner and staff and primary clientele of Lucky O’Hara’s had once been Irish Americans, that seemed no longer the case. The waitress who took Jane’s order—two hamburger steaks, one atop the other, hold the hash brown potatoes, add extra vegetables, a side of pepper slaw, a bottle of Corona—was a pretty blond-haired black-eyed girl with a Bosnian accent.

The pilsner glass was frosted, the Corona ice cold. Properly chilled beer was one of the humble pleasures that kept her in a positive frame of mind during this ordeal of threat and violence. A hot shower, a piece of favorite music, the fragrance of a flowering jasmine vine growing on a trellis, and countless other little graces reminded her of how sweet life had once been and could be again. As motivation, a desire to live well and freely again was second only to her fierce determination to keep her child safe and to give him a future from which those who would enslave him had been eradicated.

She watched the motel during lunch. Red curb restricted parking to the farther side of the street. There were no paneled vans that suggested surveillance. No obvious sentry slouched in any of the cars or SUVs.

A few doors south of the motel, overdressed for the mild day in layers of ragged sweaters and a black-and-green tartan scarf, masses of hair and beard bristling as if fossilized in that configuration following an electric shock, a vagrant sat on the sidewalk, his back against the wall of a vacant storefront. Beside him stood a shopping cart in which were heaped large green trash bags bulging with whatever eccentric collection constituted his treasure.

Such a disguise was within the repertoire of a true stakeout artist. The vagrant was the sole subject of Jane’s suspicion—until he got to his feet, stepped to the recessed entry of the building, dropped his trousers, and defecated. Although a federal agent on such an assignment would take pride in the exactitude of the details of his costume and behavior, he would not feel obliged to take a dump in public for the sake of authenticity.

Glittering in the sunlight, traffic passed in riotous variety. Jane could not detect any vehicles repeatedly circling the block in a rolling surveillance of the motel.

The appearance of normalcy at Counting Sheep concerned her. When nothing whatsoever in a scene looked suspicious, when it seemed picture-postcard serene and downright churchy, it was at such high contrast with everyplace else in this fallen world that you had to wonder if it was a setup. She had developed measured paranoia as a survival trait not just since going on the run, but from her years in law enforcement.

She spooned ice from her water tumbler into the pilsner glass to chill the remaining beer, finished lunch, eyed her watch—4:33—ordered another Corona in a chilled glass, and asked for the check.

She paid and tipped 30 percent as soon as the beer arrived, so that when she took another hour, the waitress wouldn’t worry that maybe she would skip out on the check. She said, “The bastard was supposed to be here when I arrived. I’ll give him another hour to hang himself.”

Whether she had acquired her cynicism in Bosnia or California, the waitress bluntly said, “Dump him.”

“I keep saying I will, but I don’t.”

“Girl like you has options.”

“So far none better than him.”

“They play too much video game.”

“Who does?” Jane asked.

“This generation men. Video game, porn, Internet—they don’t know how to be real anymore.”

“Prince Charming is dead,” Jane agreed.

“Not dead. Just lost. We need to find. You can’t find when you won’t look.”

“Maybe you’re right. Do you keep looking for him?”

“I look, I hope, I date—but always with knife in purse.”

“Really? A knife in your purse?”

The waitress shrugged. “Is L.A. A girl can’t take chances these days.”

Jane nursed the second beer through another hour, watching the motel while pretending to be waiting for Mr. Wrong. The homeless man with the shopping cart moved on to defecate elsewhere. The elastic shadows stretched eastward. The traffic quarreled in greater volume through the street, as if there were no other avenue in all the world, every traveler bound frantically for the same and perhaps terrible place. Counting Sheep continued to represent itself as innocent and safe.

Excessive hesitation was the mother of failure. Winning required considered action. Get off the X. Move.

She returned to the motorcycle parked on the side street. She cruised around the block, pulled into the motel lot, and parked in front of Room 5, two doors north of the unit in which she’d left her luggage.

No one was currently in the immediate vicinity. If she was a figure of interest to someone, he might be watching her from behind a window, through parted draperies.

She took off her helmet, left it on the seat of the Big Dog, and went boldly to Room 3.

High situational awareness. In Condition Yellow. No eyes in the back of her head, but alert for any sound that didn’t belong in the basketweave of street noise.

She keyed the door and pushed, and it swung into a coolness of shadows, revealing the furniture as colorless shapes in the gloom.

Before crossing the threshold, she slid her right hand under her sport coat, to the grip of the pistol in her shoulder rig.

Warily, she glanced back at the parking lot, at the street, at the motel office to the south. Nothing.

A single-file succession of fat crows, eerily silent for their raucous kind, passed low overhead. Crisply defined shadows, blacker against the pavement than the birds were black against the sky, glided past her feet, as if to encourage her to flee with them.

She was not Jane Hawk. She was Leslie Anderson. If her pursuers knew about the Anderson ID and this motel, they would have come for her in this place rather than at the library. Somehow they knew about the car, but only the car.

She entered, closed the door, switched on lights. A housekeeper had been here. The bed was made. The fragrance of an orange-scented aerosol freshened the room, though under it lay the faint lingering staleness of marijuana smoke from some previous guest. The door to the small bathroom stood open wide, and a frosted window admitted enough light to reveal that no one waited in there.

All seemed the same as when she had checked in the previous afternoon. Nonetheless, she sensed a wrongness in the room that she could not define.

Two sliding mirrored doors served the closet. As she approached them, she looked not at her image, but at the reflection of the room behind her, which seemed somehow strange and not an exact likeness, as if a threat thus far invisible might materialize from some dark dimension suddenly folding into this one.

Engine noise swelled as a vehicle pulled off the street and into the motel lot. She focused on the room door reflected in the mirror before her. The engine died. A car door slammed. She waited. Nothing.

Sometimes in the deep of night, when the sleeper’s fantasy is benign—a golden meadow, an enchanting forest—anxiety arises with no apparent cause, just before the dream is invaded by men without faces, whose fingers are razor-sharp knives. Her disquiet now was akin to the dreamer’s apprehension, the cause intuited rather than perceived.

As she slid the left-hand closet door to the right, it stuttered slightly in its corroded tracks. Her two suitcases were gone. She pushed both doors to the left. The other half of the closet also proved to be empty.

She drew the Heckler & Koch Compact .45 and turned to the room, which had taken unto itself the strangeness that she had previously perceived only in the mirror, so that every mundane object seemed to have an alien aspect, malevolent purpose.

The bathroom window was too small to serve as an exit. The room door offered the only way out.

Draperies with blackout linings covered the window to the left of the door. She would gain nothing by parting those greasy panels of fabric to see what awaited her outside. Whatever it might be, she had no choice other than to go to it.

Pistol in hand but held under her sport coat, she opened the door. After the lamplit room, the sun-shot world made her squint. She stepped outside.

The Big Dog Bulldog Bagger had disappeared. To her left, in front of Room 1, under an ill-kept phoenix palm, stood the metallic-gray Ford Explorer Sport that she had abandoned at the library several towns from here.

Neither of the exits from the motel parking lot was blockaded. No cops. No plainclothes agents.

All seemed counterfeit, as if the street were only a movie set on a studio backlot.

In the new world aborning, reality seemed frequently displaced by virtual reality.

Most people were so enchanted by high technology, they didn’t see its potential for oppression, but Jane was aware of the darkness at the core of the machine. The current culture deviated radically from previous human experience, ruthlessly reducing each woman and man to mere political units to be manipulated, balkanizing them into communities according to their likes and dislikes, so everything from cars to candy bars could be more effectively marketed, robbing them of their privacy, denying them both a real community of diverse views and the possibility of personal evolution by censoring the world they saw through the Internet to make it conform to the preferred beliefs of their self-appointed betters.

In such a world, there were daily moments like this one at the Counting Sheep Motel, across the street from Lucky O’Hara’s Bar and Grille with its smiling leprechaun and pot of gold, situations that felt unreal, that suggested the world had come unmoored from reason.

A man sat in the front passenger seat of her Explorer. In the shade of the big tree, with patterns of palm fronds reflected on the windshield, little of him could be seen.

As Jane approached the driver’s door, she held the pistol at her side, against her leg.

The window in the driver’s door was down, allowing her a better view of the guy who waited for her. She knew him. Vikram Rangnekar of the FBI.

PART TWO

1

The wind did not shriek, but moaned as if Nature had fallen into despair, and the snow slanted out of the northwest with none of the softness that the scene suggested, so that Tom Buckle turned his back to the icy teeth of the blizzard.

His vision cleared as the tears that the wind stung from his eyes briefly warmed his cheeks. In the gray spectral light of the hidden and fast-declining sun, the vast plain seemed not to fade into the storm, but to be dissolving at its farthest edges, crumbling away into some white void.

He looked southwest toward the great house. The lights were not entirely screened by the snow, but there weren’t even vague window shapes or identifiable lampposts, only a low hazy amber glow to mark the location of the distant residence. Tom yearned for the warmth within Wainwright Hollister’s walls. He briefly fantasized about returning to steal a vehicle—something big like the VelociRaptor or the armored Gurkha—and escaping overland or battering through some formidable gate at the entrance to the ranch. However, he believed what he’d been told about the security system’s ability to detect his approach and about the ruthlessness with which he would be machine-gunned.

For precious minutes, with his two hours of lead time ticking away, he stood in indecision, unable to set out in one of the directions that were not forbidden to him. He had no paths to follow. And in the arc of escape allowed him, each of those two hundred seventy degrees appeared to be a direct route to certain death. He was not an outdoorsman. His survival skills were limited to the savvy that kept his film career alive, and that had not yet proved to be enough to put him on even the B list of directors. As the child of a tailor and a seamstress, having spent thousands of hours watching uncounted movies, his experience of the natural world was limited to city parks, public beaches, and documentaries. In this immense, unpopulated snow-swept tract of land, he simply didn’t know the first thing to do any more than if he had just stepped out of a starship onto the surface of a planet at the farther end of the galaxy.

He felt small and vulnerable, as he hadn’t felt since childhood. His breath plumed from him in pale ghostly vapors, as if with each exhalation he were shedding a fraction of the spirit that inhabited his too-mortal flesh.

If he didn’t know how to survive, one thing he did know was that Hollister would never mount the fair pursuit he promised, that the crazy sonofabitch wouldn’t come on foot, but in an all-wheel-drive vehicle. And the billionaire would be tracking his quarry by means far more sophisticated than reading footprints and sifting spoor from the masking snow.

Before leaving California, Tom had checked out Crystal Creek Ranch on the Internet. Google Street offered no images, but Google Earth provided extensive satellite photographs. He had been dazzled by the size of the main residence and its associated buildings, enchanted by the verdant vastness of these twelve thousand acres.

Now he remembered the watercourse for which the ranch was named. Less of a creek than a small river, it spilled out of the western highlands and flowed past the house, southeast through various woods and meadows, continuing far beyond Hollister’s property and eventually passing under Interstate 70.

Using the glow of the distant residence as a reference point, Tom tried to call to mind the satellite images of the ranch and remember the route by which the interstate proceeded somewhat south and then more directly east toward Kansas. His recollection was at best hazy.

He had no idea how many miles he would have to walk in order to reach the highway. Thirty? Fifty? It was so distant that even on a clear night the headlights of the traffic could probably not be seen from here. Yet the interstate offered his only hope of finding help.

The Hollister property was surrounded by other enormous—and lonely—ranches, as well as by unpopulated federal territory. He might wander for days and never encounter a neighbor or a single government land manager.

Carrying the drawstring bag containing the tactical flashlight, he set out south-southeast. He wondered how he would maintain that course when distance and the bleak deluge screened from him the lights of the house, which were his only reference point.

Perhaps a hundred and fifty yards ahead lay a pine woods expressed like vertical strokes of an artist’s charcoal on white paper, robbed of detail by the waning light and waxing weather. The river ran through some but not all of the ranch’s woodlands. If he got lucky and found it among these nearest trees, he could make his way along its banks to the interstate without fear of becoming disoriented and lost in the blizzard. If nothing else, the woods seemed to offer cover.

Tom didn’t bother to check the wristwatch they had allowed him to keep. It didn’t matter whether fifty-five or fifty-six minutes of the promised two-hour lead remained. He surely did not have that much time. Not really.

Hollister was a murderer. Murder was not merely a crime but also a lie, for it made a claim that some lives had no value. If the billionaire could deny the fundamental truth of the profound meaning of every life, he was a liar’s liar, a font of falsehood. He might already be on the hunt.

With fresh powder pluming from his boots, the rotten drifts of other days and tangled masses of frozen grass crunching underfoot, Tom crossed the meadow, leaving a trail that would not quickly be filled in his wake. Erratic wind not only drove the falling flakes but also fashioned them into pale shapes, phantoms in graveclothes, that hastened across the plain in the weak and dimming light. The land seemed haunted. The world had become so strange that he would not have been surprised if a figure more solid than the apparitions of snow had suddenly loomed before him, a naked beauty with her ruined face concealed by a shimmering mask of scarlet silk.

2

The Counting Sheep Motel in its slow disintegration. The hive hum and swarm buzz of traffic, the amplified serpent hiss as a bus air-braked for passengers waiting on a bench, in the distance the hard tat-tat-tat-tat-tat of what might be either a jackhammer or an automatic weapon. Bright orange sun, ink spill of purple shadows seeping eastward.

In the front passenger seat of Jane’s Explorer Sport, warming the moment with his smile, Vikram Rangnekar said, “Hello, Jane.”

Jane stood at the open window in the driver’s door, pistol drawn, muzzle pointed at the pavement. “What is this?”

“I’ve missed you.”

“Been busy.”

“I lie awake at night worrying about you.”

“I’m okay.”

“You look okay. You look fabulous.”

“So … what is this?” she asked again.

“The disguise is optimal cool. It’s good.”

“Maybe not good enough.”

“May I say, you’re prettier without it.”

“Looking hot isn’t my main objective these days.”

“I have no gun. I mean you no harm.”

“Puts you in a damn small minority.”

“If you don’t shoot me, I can be of great help to you.”

“You’re FBI.”

“Not an agent. Never was. Just a computer buccaneer who used to work for the FBI. I resigned two weeks ago.”

Vikram was a white-hat hacker of great talent. Occasionally the Department of Justice had poached him from the Bureau and put him to work on what would have been criminal black-hat projects if they had not been conducted under the auspices of the nation’s primary law-enforcement agency. He’d had an innocent crush on her even when Nick had been alive, though he knew that she was—and always would be—a one-man woman, and he’d liked to impress her with his mastery at the keyboard. As an agent, before going rogue, Jane had always operated by the book, never resorting to illegal methods. But she had wanted to know what the corrupt inner circle at Justice might be doing, and she had encouraged Vikram to show off. He had developed back doors—“my wicked little babies”—to the computer systems of major telecom companies, alarm-company central stations, and others, and he had instructed Jane in their use. Once she had gone rogue, the ability to ghost through those systems without being detected had more than once gotten her out of a tight corner.

“If I weren’t your friend,” he said, “there would be like a hundred agents here, a SWAT team, helicopters, dogs, bomb robots. But it’s just me.”

“Not only the government wants to wring my neck.”

“Yeah, there’s some freaky group calling themselves Techno Arcadians, but I don’t know what they’re all about.”

Surprised by his knowledge, even as limited as it was, she surveyed her surroundings. Nothing amiss. She looked at Vikram again. “How do you know about the Arcadians? They don’t advertise.”

“Get in. Take us for a drive. I’ll explain.”

“Who were those people at the library?”

“Family. A brother. An uncle. Cousins. You look wonderful.”

“Where are my suitcases?”

“In the back. Take us for a drive. I’ll explain.”

“I don’t want to kill you, Vikram.”

“Good. I don’t want to be killed.”

“So don’t make it necessary.”

She holstered the pistol and climbed behind the wheel of the Explorer and pulled the driver’s door shut.

3

For three days, Charles Douglas Weatherwax waits in a luxurious suite in the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, anticipating his next assignment. He is a tall, strong, graceful man with a face of such clean, stylized lines that it looks like an Art Deco work worthy of being the hood ornament on a high-end automobile in the days when cars had hood ornaments and didn’t all look alike. He follows a high-protein low-carb diet, takes eighty vitamin pills a day, every twelve hours drinks a health product called Clean Green, and never fails to apply a number-fifty sunscreen after shaving. Each day before dinner, he sets out from his hotel on a long walk, which in part takes him through the park across the street.

During these strolls, as at all other times, he is looking for something that will justify his existence. There are people, sad cases, who never find their purpose in life. Charlie is not one of them. He has long known the meaning of his life, and he finds his mission deeply fulfilling.

During his first tour of the park, on Wednesday afternoon, he encounters a blind man sitting on a bench, in the shade of a trio of palm trees. The guy is fiftysomething. Shaved head. Neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. An MP3 player rests on the bench beside him. Without an earpiece, he listens to Jeremy Irons read T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” the first of the poet’s Four Quartets.

The listener’s blindness is suggested by dark glasses worn in the shade, implied by a white cane propped at the side of the bench, and confirmed by a beautiful German shepherd lying at its master’s feet. The grip of the leash lies untended on the bench, testament to the seeing-eye dog’s obedience and dedication.

“Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present …”

Jeremy Irons reads the lines without artifice. His straightforward presentation speaks powerfully to Charlie Weatherwax.

Charlie doesn’t interrupt the poem but continues on his way without a word to the blind man.

From childhood—he is now thirty-four—he was taught the importance of committing random acts of kindness. His father was a community organizer with a genius for winning grants to improve the quality of life in less fortunate neighborhoods, and his mother was a high school principal, later a district superintendent. Both are now retired. He has often heard them speak of the rewards of a life of service; random kindness is key to their self-image.

The following afternoon, Thursday, he discovers the blind man on the same bench, in different clothing but listening now to “The Dry Salvages,” the third of Eliot’s Four Quartets. On this second encounter, Charlie realizes that he must act. But by doing what?

“There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing / No end to the withering of withered flowers …”

Charlie passes the blind man and his dog, the voice of Jeremy Irons propelling him as if he is a leaf on the surface of a swift stream.

He says nothing, does nothing—and throughout the remainder of the day regrets his inaction. By dinnertime, his regret has grown into remorse, a sharp-toothed guilt gnawing at his heart. His sleep is troubled. There is little chance that he will encounter the blind man again and be able to make things right.

Yet now, later Friday afternoon, at the same hour as before, Charlie comes upon the sightless listener in the park. Fortunately, he has prepared for this most unlikely third chance.

“Beautiful dog,” he says, and scratches the shepherd under the chin and sits on the bench. “What’s his name?”

Clicking off the audiobook, the man says, “Argus. He’s a treasure.”

“Unusual name for a dog.”

The guy looks toward the sound of Charlie’s voice rather than directly at his face. “In Greek mythology, Argus was a giant with a hundred eyes.”

“Ah. Unusual but apt. You were listening to T. S. Eliot.”

“Yes, the Four Quartets. I never tire of it. So allusive and layered, words as music. It’s a kind of meditation for me.”

“Beautiful,” Charlie agrees. “However, its meaning has always stumped me, I’m afraid, too complex for my feeble brain. His cat poems are more my speed.”

The blind man smiles. “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Amazing that he could write works of great depth and some of the most charming light verse ever put to paper.”

Charlie quotes, “‘Jellicle cats come out tonight / Jellicle cats come one come all …’”

Argus’s master recites, “‘The Jellicle moon is shining bright / Jellicles come to the Jellicle ball.’”

Hoping for the chance to rectify his previous failure to engage the blind man, Charlie has brought with him a hamburger patty spiced and cooked to perfection by the Peninsula Hotel’s room-service chef.

Approaching the bench, he’d taken it from a small plastic bag. Now he drops the meat on the park path in front of the dog.

Quoting the four opening lines from “Macavity: The Mystery Cat” louder and with less grace than Jeremy Irons might have performed it, Charlie covers the sound of the shepherd quickly consuming the patty and then says, “Name’s Harvey Hemingway, no relation. Friends call me Harv.”

“John Duncan,” says the bald and bearded fan of Eliot. “Pleased to meet an admirer of Old Possum.”

Charlie chats him up for a few minutes and then, when no one is close to them, no one approaching along the path, he says, “I gave Argus some hamburger—”

“Oh, I wish you wouldn’t have,” says Duncan.

“—laced with a fast-acting sedative,” Charlie says.

Alarmed, the blind man stiffens and calls the dog’s name. When there is no response, he fumbles for and locates the grip loop of the leash where it lies on the bench. He tugs, but Argus is deep in dreamland.

“He’ll be out for maybe two hours and groggy for an hour after that,” Charlie says, “but no permanent damage.”

“What the hell is this?” Duncan demands, putting some steel in his voice, as if he is capable of following through on a threat, as if he is Samson, eyeless in Gaza, but still possessing the strength to defeat his enemies.

Charlie puts a hand on his companion’s shoulder. “Listen to me, shithead, and listen close. There’s no one near us in the park. Lots of traffic out there on Santa Monica Boulevard, but all they see is two friends on a bench. They call L.A. the City of Angels, but there are angels in Hell, too, and they’re not the kind would do you any kindness. You call for help, you make a sound, no one will hear or care—and I’ll blind your dog. I have a sharp penknife. I can do it easy.”

John Duncan is as still as if he were a bronze figure of a man installed on the bench as a sculpture.

“What I’m going to do,” Charlie explains, “is shock you hard with a handheld Taser. I’ll do it three times. Each time longer than the one before. It’s going to hurt like hell. If you scream or cry out, I blind Argus and leave. In fact, you do any more than whimper like a baby, the dog will need a seeing-eye dog of his own. You hear me? You understand?”

“Why?” Duncan asks.

“You’ve heard about people who want to make the world a better place by doing random acts of kindness? Well, they’re a bunch of phonies. They live a lie and love it. There’s nothing real about them. I’m the real deal. I’m what the world is truly about—acts of random cruelty.”

As Charlie reaches under his sport coat and withdraws the Taser from a holster, Duncan leans forward, hands clasping his thighs, and pleads, “Please don’t. For God’s sake—”

Jamming the poles of the Taser against the blind man’s neck, Charlie pulls the trigger.

To John Duncan, a five-second shock probably feels as if a hive of wasps has come alive inside him, swarming and stinging through bone and flesh in an angry search for an exit. His teeth chatter like one of those old novelty sets of wind-up dentures, and then they stop clacking against one another when his jaws clench tight. He shudders, writhes in place, as if tortured by clonic seizures, which continue for a moment after his tormentor lets up on the trigger; his body jerks, arms flail, and then semiparalysis locks him in his corner of the bench. He is pale and glistening with perspiration. A thread of drool unravels from one corner of his mouth. Faithful to his dog, he neither calls out for help nor screams in pain.

If Duncan makes a scene, Charlie won’t follow through on his promise to cut the eyes of the shepherd. He likes dogs. He isn’t a monster. He hates people, but he likes dogs. The threat to harm Argus is just a tool to control the blind man, to ensure that he will be submissive.

The second Tasering lasts ten seconds.

Traffic slows and then surges on Santa Monica Boulevard, each motorist in his own world as surely as he is isolate in his vehicle, oblivious of the drama on the park bench as he is also abstracted from the lives of the other citizens of the city. John Donne wrote, No man is an island, entire of itself, which Charlie Weatherwax knows to be the ripest bullshit. The human species is an infinite archipelago of islands with rough seas separating them. All men and women are vortexes of pure self-interest, their self-love whirling at such velocity that true concern for others can never escape the centrifugal force of their narcissism.

To see his victim’s vacant stare, Charlie plucks off John Duncan’s sunglasses and throws them aside before Tasering him yet again, this time for fifteen seconds. Throughout Duncan’s body, every fascicle of nerve fibers short-circuits. The sightless orbs roll back in the man’s head as he is once more gripped by seizures, so that his gaze is without irises, blank and white, a stare as pitiless as nature itself.

Charlie puts away the Taser and rolls the half-paralyzed blind man onto his right side, against an arm of the bench, just long enough to extract the wallet from his right hip pocket. He finds a photo ID and memorizes Duncan’s street address. He returns the ID and leaves the wallet on the bench.

Hardly more than a minute has passed since Charlie administered the first shock.

They still have the park to themselves, though a woman pushing a stroller is entering from Wilshire Boulevard.

Propping Duncan in a corner of the bench, Charlie says, “Do you hear me, Johnny?” The blind man makes a wordless sound of distress, and Charlie amps the menace in his voice. “Do you hear me, Johnny?”

Duncan’s words are slurred, but his eyes roll back into place, like symbols on the wheels in the windows of a slot machine, bright blue but oblivious. “Yeah, I hear.”

“I looked in your wallet. I know where you live. You ever tell anyone about this, describe me to anyone, I’ll pay you a visit.”

“No. I won’t. I swear.”

Charlie rises to his feet. “Random acts of cruelty, Johnny. That’s what the world’s about. That’s the sum of it. Get ready for the next one. It’ll be coming. They’re always coming.”

The woman with the stroller has stopped at a distant bench. If she eventually continues in this direction, she will not find the blind man while Charlie is still in sight.

He continues on his way. When he glances back, he sees John Duncan leaning forward on the bench, vomiting on his shoes.

In a couple of hours, the dog will wake. An hour after that, it will be alert and stable enough to lead its master home in the early dark.

The pain John Duncan has experienced is nothing compared to the profound humiliation that he now endures and that will seethe in him for days to come. Perhaps he will fall into despair, which is not necessarily a bad thing. If it does not destroy you, despair can be a fire that burns away the erroneous understanding of the world by which so many people live. If all of the blind man’s illusions can be reduced to ashes, if he can come to understand the truth of the world, that it was not shapen except by chance and that it has no meaning, that nothing matters but power, its acquisition and its use, that power is won by the infliction of pain and humiliation on others, then he will be free for the first time in his life. Even with the limitations of his disability, he might more often avoid being a victim.

Serving as a missionary of pain and humiliation, committing random acts of cruelty, is not work suitable for a common street thug or a crooked politician. Both drug-pushing gangbangers and corrupt senators lie to themselves and to others, claiming to act for the benefit of the clan, for the common good and social justice, in response to oppression, when in fact they seek power for power’s sake. Liars and those who live a lie cannot remake the world for the better. A missionary, like Charlie Weatherwax, must embrace no lies, must live by no illusions, bleak as that might be, for power is the only truth, and truth is the source of power.

4

With its thousands of blacktop rivers and millions of metal currents, the Los Angeles evening rush lasted not one hour, but three or four. The Valley streets overflowed with vehicles surging-slackening-surging to and from the dysfunctional freeways. Vikram gave Jane an address, but the flood of traffic didn’t frustrate her. There were many questions to be answered, explanations to be made, and an understanding to be arrived at before they reached their destination.

She said, “You could have confronted me in the library.”

Vikram shook his head. “Not safely, I think. When you see me suddenly show up, you don’t see a lean but sinewy dark-eyed black-haired young man who might have been a Bollywood star. Instead you see FBI, and you think you’re trapped. So logically, an unfortunate confrontation ensues.”

“‘Lean but sinewy’?”

Vikram shrugged. “When describing myself to various online matchmaking services, the word ‘slim’ can be interpreted as meaning skinny or worse. Anyway, say I show up in the library and say just maybe you don’t shoot me, there’s still bound to be a scene that people are witness to. They call the police, they post it on YouTube, and we are toast.”

“Your relatives herded me into that vacant photography studio. Why weren’t you waiting for me in that place, where there weren’t any witnesses?”

Vikram raised his right hand, pointing at the roof of the SUV with his forefinger, as if to say, One important point to consider. “Remember, the chase had only just begun, and you were virtually sweating adrenaline.”

“I don’t sweat virtually.”

“Nevertheless, the math said the risk of my being shot on sight was still too high at that time.”

“‘Math’?”

“I have my formulas. It was wiser to lead you through a few twists and turns, give you time to understand this wasn’t a standard law-enforcement operation. Then I show up alone, no backup, and you realize I am harmless.”

“Who is Garret Nolan?”

“Mr. Motorcycle? He’s not one of us. He was just a hiccup. There are always hiccups. Some say that life is one long series of hiccups, although personally I’m not so pessimistic. Farther along that street from Mr. Nolan, a Honda waited at the curb, its engine running. A bright red Honda. Studies show that, in a crisis, the eye is drawn to red things. My brother, wearing a flamboyant red shirt, was prepared to leap out of the red Honda and dash into a Chinese restaurant, ostensibly to pick up an order of takeout, but in fact giving you a chance to steal his wheels, which of course we could track by its GPS. However, you found Mr. Nolan first. Beware, the traffic light is about to turn red.”

Jane braked to a stop. She looked at her passenger.

Smiling into her silence, Vikram said, “What?”

“You scripted it like some chase scene in a movie?”

“When I build a back door into the computer system of a major telecom provider, I don’t just wing it, you know. To get away with it, I have to be meticulous. Being meticulous is what makes me Vikram Rangnekar.”

“If Garret Nolan was a hiccup, unexpected, how did you track me from the time he gave me a ride?”

“Just in case, my cousin Ganesh tagged you earlier in the library.”

She recalled the plump guy in khakis and a yellow pullover, at a workstation near her in the computer alcove. “‘Tagged’?”

“As you were leaving, Ganesh fired a little device loaded with an adhesive microminiature transponder. Hit you in the back.”

When she had glanced at Ganesh, he’d been holding something in his left hand, down at his side. “I didn’t feel it happen.”

“You wouldn’t,” Vikram said. “It’s low-velocity. The soft projectile weighs three-quarters of an ounce. It partially unravels and weaves itself into the fabric of your coat. Lithium battery the size of a pea. It’s trackable by satellite, just like any vehicle with a GPS.”

She said, “Jhav.”

Vikram’s eyebrows arched. “That is a Hindi word.”

“But appropriate.”

“Wherever did you learn that word?”

“From you.”

“Not possible. I would never use that word in the presence of a woman.”

“You use it all the time when you’re at a computer, backdooring your way into one place or another.”

“Is that really true? I was unaware. I hope you don’t know what it means.”

“It means ‘fuck.’”

“I am mortified.”

“It’s me who should be mortified, being tagged and not even aware of it. Jhav!”

A horn blared behind them. The light had changed.

Vikram again pointed at the roof with one finger. “The light has changed.”

“No shit?” she said as she took her foot off the brake.

“I sense you’re perturbed at me.”

“No shit?”

“Why are you perturbed at me?”

“You played me. I don’t like being played.”

“The math said it was necessary.”

“Math isn’t everything. Trust is important.”

“I trust the math.”

“I remembered you as a sweet man. I forgot the annoying part.”

Vikram grinned. “Is that really true?”

“Yes. You can be über-annoying.”

“I meant the ‘sweet man’ part.”

Rather than encourage him, she said, “So you knew what motel I was staying in.”

“Yes. But I expected you to return there in the red Honda, not on the motorcycle. Nevertheless, it worked out.”

“How the jhav did you find me in the first place?”

“Just so you know, I am not one who is turned on by women talking dirty.”

“Don’t make me have to shoot you, Vikram. How did you find me?”

“Now that,” he said, “is quite a story.”

5

Charlie Weatherwax leaves the blind man in the park, crosses the boulevard, and walks through the public spaces around city hall, into a residential neighborhood of tree-lined streets, and from there into the fabled shopping district of Beverly Hills, north of Wilshire. The sidewalks are crowded with moneyed locals bearing shopping bags, also with gaping tourists dazzled by the gleaming shops as well as by the countless Mercedes, Bentleys, and Rolls-Royces. They see one another and interact, but they do not know one another, these islanders of the human archipelago, and they would have it no other way, though if asked they would lay claim to all manner of communal values.

As the sky gradually darkles and the lighted windows of the closing shops radiate glamour and romance into the evening streets, he makes his way to a fine restaurant at which he has a reservation. A choice table awaits him in a corner of the elegant Art Deco bar, the design of which seems to have been inspired by the clean, highly stylized features of his face.

He is not halfway through his martini when he receives an encrypted call on his smartphone. In spite of all its vast resources in both the public and private sectors, the Arcadian revolution has taken two weeks to get a lead on Vikram Rangnekar, but at last they are ready to provide Charlie with an address. His team will be awaiting him at the Peninsula in an hour.

He must be satisfied with a less leisurely dinner than he anticipated, and a single martini instead of two. But the evening will be a lively one, with hard truths taught to the revolution’s enemies.

6

Riding shotgun without benefit of a shotgun, Vikram Rangnekar thought, I have never been happier. Which was amazing, considering that he had been happy for all his thirty years. According to his mother, Kanta, he had never once been cranky as a baby, and indeed had greeted the obstetrician and delivery-room nurses not with a cry of distress at being expelled from the womb, but with a sound that seemed to be part sigh, part giggle, and with a smile. His father, Aadil, called him chotti batasha, which meant “little sugar candy,” because he was always so good-natured and cheerful. There were those who resented being exposed to his unrelenting sunniness, and a few who even despised him for it; he repaid their hostility with neither anger nor pity, but with indifference, for he was not inclined to let other people annoy him.

Of course bad things had happened to Vikram. No one got a free ride in this troubled world. There were times when he was sad, but those spells were transient and almost always related to the death of someone he loved or admired. For as long as he could remember, he’d understood that happiness was a choice, that there were people who didn’t realize it was theirs to choose or who, for whatever reason, preferred to be perpetually discontented, even angry, even despairing. Most of that type were very political, which Vikram was not. Or they were consumed by envy, which Vikram was not. Or they loved themselves too much, so that they never felt the world was treating them well enough, or they liked themselves too little and wished they were someone else. Vikram liked who he was, although he didn’t think he was God’s gift either to the world or to women.

He’d had his share of romance. He wasn’t a virgin at thirty. There were some women who liked lean and sinewy guys who were gentle and treated them with respect. Of his few paramours, however, none had been fated to be with him forever. One turned out to be waiting to meet a slab of muscle named Curt, who would abuse and disrespect her, and she went off with him. Another, in her second year of graduate school, having learned that men were unnecessary social constructs, vowed to have relations henceforth only with a battery-powered device. The third, an idealistic girl named Larisa, pursuing a career in broadcast journalism, to her dismay concluded that her chosen profession was largely populated by “narcissistic, ill-educated phonies,” and left Washington, where Vikram lived in those days, to return to her hometown—Cedar Rapids, Iowa—where she hoped “to find something real.”

Fortunately, Vikram’s happiness did not depend on the condition of his romantic life.

He thought again, I have never been happier, and of course his current extreme good cheer had everything to do with his driver, Jane Hawk, with whom he’d been infatuated for more than five years. His was largely a platonic infatuation, though not entirely. He was a man, after all, and Jane was too beautiful and too desirable for any straight man to yearn to be only her friend. However, he knew there would never be any romance between them. The sadness of that realization was but a droplet compared to the great warm welling of happiness that he felt just being in her company. When Nick had been alive, no man on Earth could have stolen Jane’s heart, for she had loved him—and he’d loved her—with an intensity that nineteenth-century novelists had described convincingly, but that was seldom found in contemporary arts because such love alluded to a higher love that inspired only contempt in the artists of this era—well, contempt and fear. In death, Nick haunted his lovely widow, not by his spirit’s choice but by her insistent invitation; even if Jane thoroughly avenged her husband’s murder, Vikram suspected that Nick might always be in the doorway of her heart, barring entrance to all other men.

Unrequited love was reward enough for him, which had better be the case, considering that, by coming to this woman’s aid, he put his life at risk and might not survive long enough to earn even a kiss on the cheek.

“How did you find me?” she repeated as she piloted the Explorer Sport through a Pamplona of wheeled bulls all charging southward on Interstate 405 into a sudden inexplicable absence of congestion, the light of the setting sun flickering off brightwork and window glass.

“It’s known that you’ve been driving off-market vehicles with forged plates,” Vikram said. “You had to abandon a black Ford Escape in Texas when the highway patrol pulled you over for some reason, not realizing who you were. You left the trooper handcuffed to your Ford and split in his cruiser. The FBI took your car apart, trying to track its history, but they got epsilon out of it, nothing, nada. I remembered something you told me after you closed the Marcus Paul Headsman case, about this cash-only car dealer in Nogales, Arizona.”

Marcus Paul Headsman had been a serial killer who tried to live up to his surname by collecting the heads of his victims and storing them in a freezer. He said he would have liked to keep their bodies as well, but he would have had to buy several new freezers, for which he lacked the funds.

Headsman had stolen a vehicle from Enrique de Soto, who ran a black-market operation out of a series of barns on a property outside of Nogales. Enrique paid boosters for hijacked cars and trucks. He ferried the hot merchandise directly across the border to Nogales, Mexico, where his people stripped out the GPS and all identifiers. They rebuilt the engine of each vehicle to ensure it would be faster than anything a cop would be driving and returned it to Arizona. Enrique provided forged registration papers and license plates for every customer, which in spite of being bogus had been inserted in Department of Motor Vehicles digital records and would allay the suspicions of any officer of the law. When Headsman was caught, he gave up Enrique, hoping to buy a little leniency.

“I remembered,” said Vikram. “I remember so much of what you told me over the years. Probably all of it. So I backdoored Bureau case files to see what had happened to Enrique de Soto.”

“Nothing happened to him,” Jane said. “We were after Marcus Paul Headsman, and we got him. No time for small fish like Enrique.”

Even when the Bureau was well managed, when it wasn’t being weaponized and used against domestic political enemies, it was nonetheless overwhelmed with cases and needed to practice triage, focusing its manpower on the most egregious crimes that were urgently in need of being addressed. When lesser scofflaws were found wriggling under the rocks that had been overturned in the pursuit of more dangerous and consequential felons, they were either referred to local authorities or added to a collateral-crimes file for later investigation, which is what happened to Enrique de Soto’s case. Later investigation usually translated as the day after never, because there was always bigger game to hunt.

Vikram said, “I remember you wanted to go after de Soto, but if you pushed the issue, your superiors would see you as a quarterback for lost causes. You had to conform to the Bureau Way if you were to have a future in it.”

“And look how well that turned out.”

“So I figured maybe you were getting vehicles from de Soto. I deleted him from the collateral-crimes file, so that no one else in the Bureau would make a connection between him and the Headsman case, and I went down to Nogales to talk with him.”

They were coming toward an exit to a place they didn’t want to go. Jane changed lanes, took the ramp, descended the banked curve at what felt like two Gs, and shot into a neighborhood of industrial buildings that loomed in dark and threatening configurations against the crimson western sky.

She pulled to the curb, put the Explorer in park, switched off the headlights, and turned to Vikram. “Are you freakin’ crazy?”

“What? What’d I do?”

“Ricky de Soto isn’t just some half-assed chop-shop dirtbag. He deals weapons, he’s in human trafficking, he’s a stone-cold killer when he has to be.”

“Well, you deal with him.”

“I don’t have any choice but to deal with him, I know how to deal with him, I can hand him his balls on a plate if I have to, but I still watch my back every damn second I’m near him. But you! You weren’t trained at Quantico. If you carried a gun you’d be no danger to anyone but yourself. When you walk into Ricky’s operation, you’re a bunny rabbit stepping into a wolf’s den.”

“I’m no bunny rabbit,” Vikram protested.

She punched his arm.

“Ow!”

“You’re a sweet, naïve damn bunny rabbit,” she insisted, and she punched him again to emphasize her assertion.

7

On the freeway high above, headlights drilled the descendent night as traffic rocketed toward Long Beach and points south. Of the surrounding factories and warehouses and storage yards, some were eerily lighted and engaged in seemingly infernal industry, others perhaps abandoned, dark walls bearing spray-painted Day-Glo gang symbols like the runes of an off-planet civilization. The streets were vaguely lighted by lampposts, some having been shot out for sport. As the last sunlight bled from the sky, the only vehicles on the move nearby were large trucks that resembled military transports embarked on a clandestine mission in a world at perpetual war.

Jane’s heart pounded as though she’d just boarded the Explorer after a hundred-yard dash. She had lost people who were dear to her, who were dead because they tried to help her, and their deaths weighed on her more painfully every day. Others were even now at risk, not least of all the people who had taken her son, Travis, into their home in Scottsdale, to hide him there for the duration. She could kill any bloody-minded Arcadian who came at her with murderous intent and suffer no enduring anguish, but the guiltless who died because of her were a stain on her soul. She hoped, perhaps irrationally, that she’d be able to conclude this crusade without inducing other innocents to join the resistance only then to forfeit their lives.

And now here was Vikram.

“What’d you hit me for?”

“I don’t want you dead.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ve got winnitude.”

“‘Winnitude’?”

“Winnitude. I land on my feet like a cat.”

“Like a kitten. Ricky de Soto is a viper. You’re not in his league.”

“Obviously he didn’t kill me.”

“Which is astounding. You just walk in on him, wanting to know did he sell me some off-market wheels—me, the most-wanted fugitive in the country.”

“I knew it was tricky—”

“‘Tricky’?”

“So I didn’t go alone.”

She closed her eyes. “Whatever you’re about to say isn’t going to make it better.”

“There were five of us. My brother. An uncle. Two cousins, including Judy, the one who was driving the Escalade at the library earlier. There’s safety in numbers.”

“There’s no safety in numbers,” Jane disagreed.

“What’s he going to do—kill us all?”

“Yes. Exactly. He’d likely kill you all, have his guys dig a mass grave with a backhoe, dump you in it, cover you up, and go out for a nice lunch.”

“First thing, I explained about the Bureau’s collateral-crimes file, how I’d done him the big favor of deleting him from it.”

“I want to hit you again. Damn it, Vikram, at that moment he realized only you know about him and only you could one day insert him in the file again or tell the FBI about him.”

Massaging his arm where she’d hit him, Vikram thought about what he’d done. After a silence, he said, “I guess it could have gotten ugly at that point.”

“Ugly. Oh, you don’t know ugly.”

“But it didn’t.” He grinned and said, “You know why it didn’t get ugly? Because Enrique is hot for you.”

“That’s not exactly news to me, Vikram. If I didn’t have the widow-in-mourning excuse, I’d have had to pull a gun on Ricky more than once.”

“I explained to him how I could help you if I could find you, how I could almost surely find you if I knew what you were driving. I gave him a demonstration on his computer, how I can backdoor everyone from the FBI to the National Security Agency to Homeland Security. He was mega impressed. He offered me a position with his company.”

“It’s not a company, Vikram. It’s a criminal operation.”

“Anyway, he was excited to think you might survive all this and then you’d owe him and maybe think of him as Sir Gilligan.”

“Who?”

“I realized he meant Galahad, from the knights of the Round Table, but I didn’t think it would be smart to correct him.”

“That’s why you still have a tongue.”

“Anyway,” Vikram said, pointing at the roof again with his right index finger, “the important thing is he believed me. He told me what he’d last sold you and what license plates he put on it.”

Nationwide, most police cruisers and many government vehicles were equipped with 360-degree license-plate-scanning systems that automatically recorded the numbers from all the vehicles around them. They continuously transmitted the data to regional archives but also to the National Security Agency’s million-square-foot data center in Utah.

Three years ago, at the instruction of corrupt officials high in the Department of Justice, Vikram had installed a rootkit in the NSA’s system. This powerful malware program functioned at such a low level that he could swim through their data troves without risk of drawing the attention of IT security sharks.

Although he had delighted in demonstrating his genius—his wicked little babies—to Jane, although he had taught her how to backdoor telecom companies, the Department of Motor Vehicles in any of the fifty states, and numerous other entities, he had carefully avoided exposing her to charges of espionage. He had never shown her how to access the NSA or any other intelligence service.

So after making a new best friend in Enrique de Soto, he had backdoored the NSA to search the archives of license-plate scans for the number that Ricky had provided when he’d sold the Ford Explorer Sport to Jane.

“In the less than two weeks you’ve had the vehicle,” Vikram said, “the plates have been scanned on twelve occasions. Twice in Arizona. Otherwise in various places in Southern California. The most recent was Wednesday, in the San Fernando Valley, on Roscoe Boulevard, by a scanner-equipped car belonging to the Environmental Protection Agency.”

The NSA also retained vast video files from key public-building security cameras and from tens of thousands of traffic cams in major metropolitan areas. Using the date and time—12:09 P.M.—of the EPA automatic recording of the Explorer license plate, Vikram accessed those video archives to review the intersections of Roscoe Boulevard and other streets in the vicinity of the sighting.

“It was Wednesday evening when I was tooling this, using my laptop in a hipster hotel in Santa Monica. I found your Explorer on video in ten minutes and followed it nine blocks to the Counting Sheep, where it seemed you’d taken a room early that afternoon. So then I got in my car and drove there for real, and sure enough your SUV was parked right in front of Room Three. Before you hit me again, consider that if it was the black hats who had that license number, you’d already be in their custody or dead.”

Jane grimaced. “I’m not going to hit you again.”

“But I’ll understand if you do. Totally. Unequivocally. I now understand your point of view. Enrique. Viper. Out of my league.”

“If you were at the motel two nights ago, why didn’t you contact me then?”

“The math was still way bad. High probability that you would’ve shot me on sight, at least to wound.”

“What—your formulas are based on the assumption I’m trigger-happy?”

“No, no, no. But math is math. I went back to my hotel and cooked up my little scenario in about an hour and got my cast together, and it worked out great.”

Although he was thirty, there was a part of Vikram that would be forever an ebullient teenager.

“Sweetie,” Jane said affectionately, to be sure that she had his complete attention, “do you understand how deep the shit is that you’re in now?”

“Up to my chin,” he said with a smile. “But you need help. You need a friend. I am your friend.”

“How do you know I’m not as evil as they claim?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Maybe I did kill Nick, just like they say. Maybe I sold national security secrets. Maybe you don’t know me at all.”

“I know you. My heart tells me who you really are.”

“Your heart, huh?”

“Heart and brain and intuition. You are good to the bone.”

She sighed and shook her head. “No one is good to the bone. The things I’ve done, had to do—you don’t know. Do you also realize, if you become a target of these people, your family will be targeted, too, everyone you drew into your ‘little scenario’?”

“I’ve taken care of my relatives. They’re deeply hidden. Deeply, deeply. The black hats know nothing about them.”

“Wrong. This is Google World, Facebook World, Big Brother masquerading as Big Friend, so they know everything about your family, including what underwear they buy.”

“They have vanished in the mists,” Vikram insisted. “They can’t be found.”

“Anyone can be found.”

“They haven’t found you.”

“More than once they have. It’s been so close I just about had to shed my skin to slip away.”

“Anyway, they don’t have to stay hidden for long. Just until we vindicate you and destroy your enemies.”

In the interest of keeping him real, she gave him some snark. “This is Friday evening. Do you figure to finish the job by Sunday?”

A huge flatbed eighteen-wheeler with tires as large as those on a supersized earthmover came off the interstate. Like prison-yard searchlights, the headlamp beams washed through the Explorer. The truck driver, high in his cab, wore sunglasses at night and looked as hard-faced as a robot. An enormous construct of some kind was chained to the flatbed and concealed by canvas tarps. It was all quite ordinary, surely, but lately even the most mundane things often seemed strange and menacing.

When the truck passed and the sound of it faded, Vikram said, “For every back door I built into a computer system, at the order of someone at Justice—and even twice for the FBI director himself—I also built a second back door for my personal use. They weren’t wise to that. The old guard is enthusiastic about the power that technology can give them but at the same time ignorant about it. They knew epsilon about what I was doing for myself.”

Weariness had pulled Jane down in her seat. Now she sat up straight behind the wheel.

Vikram spoke fast, as if afraid she wouldn’t give him time to win her over. “So now I can ghost through any intelligence-service, law-enforcement, or government computer system of consequence. I can read the encrypted internal emails of every warped agent of every gone-to-the-dark-side agency searching for you. It’s all archived, this history of evil scheming. I’d already been phantom reading, which is how I caught sly passing references to Arcadians now and then. I didn’t know what it meant, but it seemed like they must be some kind of secret society. So then what I did is I scanned a humongous amount of text messages of anyone who mentioned Arcadians, searching for other unusual words that maybe were dog whistles, you know, that meant something special to them. And I found terms they shared like ‘adjusted people’ and ‘brain-screwed’ and something called the ‘Hamlet list,’ though I haven’t been able to figure out what any of it means. I also kept seeing these weird references to a central committee, regional commanders, cell leaders, as if they’re some crazy nest of total revolutionaries. And then what I did is I developed this algorithm, an app to scan all archived messages by the tens of thousands per hour and identify as many people as possible who are using these terms.”

When Vikram ran out of breath, Jane took a moment to find her voice. “You … you’ve got names?”

“Lots of names.”

“How many? A hundred? Two hundred?”

“More than three thousand eight hundred.”

“Holy shit.”

“Some of them are real pooh-bahs, top of the food chain in government, industry, the media.”

Jane had killed several Arcadians who had given her no choice but to cut them down, and she had identified others, perhaps a score of them, maybe two score. “I’ve been collecting evidence, but … but you put together a whole damn membership directory.”

“I’m sure it’s nowhere near complete, but it will be in a few days. What exactly are they up to? Why do all these people want you dead? Did they kill Nick? Why did they kill him?”

Hope thrilled through her, a positive expectation more intense than anything she had felt in weeks. A prickling sensation traced the ladder of her spine, and her heart beat faster, and something akin to joy induced a deep pleasurable shudder. “Vikram, you’re a genius.”

“Yes, I know. But you’re a genius, too. I’ve reviewed your Bureau file. Your IQ is one-sixty-five.”

“I couldn’t have done what you’ve done,” she said.

“Well, I can’t do the things you do. You’re right—I would be a danger to myself with a gun.”

“I’m sorry I called you a bunny rabbit.”

He shrugged. “There’s some truth in the description. Though I would die for you.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t even think it.”

“Well, but I would.” He looked away from her, gazed into the cloistered realm of the aged industrial district, where the shadows seemed sentient and sinister, where the inadequate lights distorted and concealed more than they revealed. In a voice softened by the particular modesty that is a sensitive shrinking from any indelicate subject, he said, “I’ve admired you for a long time. I won’t call it more than admiration. It can’t lead to anything more. I understand that. I don’t mean to embarrass you, and you must not respond, there is no possible response, but I just needed to say it.”

She reached out and took his hand and brought it to her lips and kissed it once.

Having difficulty swallowing, her chest tight with emotion, she switched on the headlights, pulled away from the curb, and returned to the interstate.

8

The false twilight of the storm gave way to the true twilight. Darkness came down through the stately pines with the wind-driven crystalfall, and the fragrant trees arrayed themselves in the blizzard’s ermine, so that little of the snow accumulated on the floor of the woods. On sunny days, not much sunlight penetrated the layered vaults of needled branches, and there was little underbrush to inhibit progress.

Tom Buckle was able to move surely if not swiftly among the evergreens. However, the progress that the terrain allowed didn’t build his confidence. Until he found the river, Crystal Creek, he couldn’t know whether he was heading in the right direction, and the river eluded him. He seemed to be moving southeast in a straight line toward the interstate, but in truth he had no references by which he could determine direction. Maybe, in these parts, moss grew only on the north face of the trees or perhaps the pines inclined toward the eastern sun because the mountains to the west shortened the afternoon, but he was no Daniel Boone, and he was likely to be wrong about everything he imagined from moss to inclination. He was half-afraid that he might not be making any headway at all, that in his disorientation, he might be circling through the woods and, were he to switch on the Tac Light, would find himself tramping across tracks he had made earlier.

In this forest of the night, Tom was not blind, but his dark-adapted eyes left him half-sighted. The architecture of nature was rendered in shades of gray and shapes without detail, and at the farther limits of vision, the woods seemed amorphous, changing. The trees were marshaled like the ranks of an army of silent giants in a dream, awaiting violent action. He wanted to cover as much ground as possible before using the Tac Light, for fear that Wayne Hollister might be nearer than he knew. But then he arrived at a shape that nature hadn’t made, a looming irregularity in the sameness of pines. He heard a low rhythmic sound distinct from the steady drone of the wind and the hiss of the needled boughs that combed it.

He dared the flashlight at its least intense setting. Before him stood a square, windowless structure of tightly mortared native stone, about eight feet on a side, too small to be inhabited. The four slopes of the roof met at a pinnacle that featured a finial like a large ice pick encircled by an eggbeater. Mounted on each slope, aimed into its quadrant of the forest, a bowl-like object about three feet in diameter had sloped walls funneling to a depth of perhaps eighteen inches, from the center of which protruded a finely textured cone.

Tom’s gut fluttered as if cocooned within it were some winged thing eager to fly free, and the chill that climbed his spine had nothing to do with the cold against which he was outfitted.

The rhythmic, muffled thumping seemed to come from under the small building. He doubted that it could be anything other than the leaden chugging of a propane-fueled generator supplying power to whatever the structure contained.

The bowl-like objects on the roof were reminiscent of high-gain antennas. In fact, they could be nothing else.

He thought he understood what he had come upon, but he needed to be certain about the purpose of this place. He put the Tac Light on the ground, tilted it to illuminate the door, and withdrew the gun from the zippered pocket on the right leg of his insulated storm suit. He had only ten rounds, but he couldn’t conceive of needing more than two or three in any confrontation with Hollister; if he didn’t kill the man with the first few shots, he would be cut down himself. Heedless of ricochets and shrapnel, he aimed at the door and fired three rounds into the wood between the metal escutcheon and the jamb, the crack of pistol fire echoing loudly through the dark and frosted woods.

Bullet-split wood splintered the air, and the muzzle smoked, and the guts of the lock rattled when he kicked the door, rattled louder on the second kick. The door burst open when he kicked it a third time.

Warm air breathed over him. Like the tiny green, red, and white eyes of some exotic vermin, scores of indicator lights regarded him from the darkness within. He felt for a wall switch to the left of the door, found it. Banks of arcane equipment were revealed along three walls of the hut.

Wainwright Warwick Hollister was one of the world’s wealthiest men, and as such he had enemies. Indeed, he evidently thought the entire free society in which he lived was a threat to him. He seemed to be in the grip of profound paranoia. Tom intuited the purpose of this building. The billionaire feared that if a hit team somehow got onto this vast property undetected, they would first marshal their forces in the cover of timberland and then make their way within striking distance of the main house by staying as much as possible within one swath of forest after another. This hut was an automated listening post, of which there were no doubt more situated in other isolate woods. Computers running sound-analysis programs would seine from the common chorus of nature any noises that implied a human presence and would alert the security detail at the main residence.

Hollister didn’t need to track bootprints in the snow or search the storm-shrouded night for the flicker of a flashlight. He need not have the knowledge of an Indian scout of another era. He was at this moment being informed telemetrically that Tom Buckle was transiting these particular acres of pines.

In fact, the moment the door of the hut had been breached, an alarm—silent to Tom—surely would have alerted those at the house. No doubt Hollister, whether on foot or in a vehicle, had likewise been informed by way of whatever communications device he carried.

The hunter was even now venturing through this island of trees or approaching its shores, and he knew precisely where his quarry could be found.

Gripping the pistol in his right hand, Tom Buckle snatched the Tac Light off the ground with his left, turned from the hut, and ran the gauntlet of evergreens. His eyes were not dark-adapted anymore. And he could no longer presume that darkness would avail him more than speed. He kept the Tac Light on its broadest, palest setting, the better to see optional pathways through the pines, but also because its narrowest, brightest beam was so intense that, on a clear night, it could be seen two miles away. The density of the woods precluded detection at such a distance, but Hollister was likely to be much nearer than that and perhaps closing fast.

The thick-growing woods, seeming to condense around him as he ran, made it unlikely that he would be shot in flight, even if the billionaire was armed with a fully automatic carbine. Scattered patches of the dirty crusted snows of other days and a thick carpet of pine needles provided treacherous footing. However, the greatest danger came from low-hanging branches, of which there were few in this mature woods, though not few enough.

He had lost all sense of direction. He wanted only to flee from the hut and find a meadow, where the faint phosphorous glow of the snowfield would make the flashlight unnecessary. Perhaps there would be no high-tech listening stations in the open land, where Hollister need not fear that assassins might gather undetected.

The billionaire’s voice played in memory as Tom ran: I am also a fair man, Tom. In the contest to come, you will have a chance to survive.

Perhaps a fragile thread of truth wove through Hollister’s tapestry of lies, but the devil was in the definitions of fair and chance. He was as fair as certain poisonous spiders are fair when they paralyze their prey with venom that leaves them feeling no pain while later they are eaten alive. And one chance in a thousand is still a chance, as is one in ten thousand.

9

Traffic congealed again, and during the rushless last hour of their journey to Newport Beach, Jane told Vikram Rangnekar about Bertold Shenneck’s nanoweb implants, the Hamlet list, the adjusted people, the brain-scrubbed rayshaws shorn of memory and personality, reprogrammed as stoic and obedient killing machines. She explained the degree to which the cabal could influence—maybe even control—the majority of media outlets, as well as the extent of their infiltration into the FBI, Homeland Security, NSA, and other national security and law-enforcement agencies. She skimmed through the high points of her actions in recent weeks, quickly describing what evidence she had gathered.

Although Jane’s story sounded like a fever dream even to her, Vikram listened with just a few interruptions, and his silence signified neither disbelief nor even skepticism. What he had learned on his own were pieces of a puzzle that clicked into place with each of her revelations, forming a dire picture that was as logical and convincing as it was dark and strange. Each time she glanced at him, his sweet face hardened further from disquiet to dismay to dread. Once when he met her glance, she saw a horror of the future in his large, expressive eyes.

Nearing Newport, as Jane transitioned from Interstate 405 to State Highway 73, Vikram said, “If we could capture one of these adjusted people and put him through an MRI, would we see proof of this brain implant?”

“I guess so. I don’t really know. I don’t think we could get one of them to cooperate, and even if we saw proof, I’m not sure we could drill through the media blackout on all of this.”

“The Arcadians have it locked down that tight?”

“I don’t know how many journalists, publishers, and other media types are true believers in the cause and how many might be adjusted people, brain-screwed, being controlled by Techno Arcadians. But, yeah, they seem able to block all reportage of this.”

The congestion relented again, and traffic was moving fluidly.

As they descended to the new freeway via an elevated connector, Jane saw a patrol car below, snugged against the right-hand shoulder of the roadway, waiting for an unsuspecting motorist to enter the down ramp faster than the posted speed allowed. She looked at the speedometer. She was all right.

“A few weeks ago,” she continued, “I spoke to a forensic pathologist, Dr. Emily Rossman, who had worked in the Los Angeles medical examiner’s office. When she trephined the skull of a woman who committed suicide, she saw the nanoweb.”

They swept past the cruiser and merged one lane to the left, heading south on State Highway 73. In the rearview mirror, she saw the patrol car’s headlights bloom. Its roof-mounted lightbar suddenly blazed and began flashing with authority.

“Dr. Rossman saw a gossamer fairylike structure of intricately designed circuits netting all four lobes of the brain, disappearing into various sulci, with a concentration on the corpus callosum. She was scared shitless. She thought she was looking at evidence of an extraterrestrial invasion.”

The patrol car was coming up fast behind them, but no siren wailed yet.

“Shortly after Dr. Rossman opened the cadaver’s skull, maybe as a reaction to contact with the air, the nanoweb dissolved. She said it was ‘like the way certain salts absorb moisture from the air and just deliquesce.’”

Still without a siren, the cruiser moved one lane to the left of the Explorer and sped past, dwindling in the night as if it, too, were a construct of deliquescent salts.

“There was residue?” Vikram asked.

“Some. Dr. Rossman sent it to the lab. She never got the report because the next day she was told to leave and accept severance pay or be fired. They had trumped up a charge against her.”

“Don’t they videotape autopsies?”

“As I recall, the video disappeared.”

Vikram pointed to a sign that listed upcoming exits. “We’re close now. Get off at MacArthur Boulevard.”

The patrol car was nearing the top of the exit ramp as Jane drove onto the bottom of it.

Halfway up the ramp, she glanced in the rearview mirror to see if another black-and-white might be tailing her. Nothing.

She said, “I feel boxed in even when I’m not.”

“Which is why you’ve survived this long.”

From MacArthur Boulevard, they turned onto Bison—and saw a cluster of four police vehicles in front of a store in an upscale strip mall to the right.

“Tell me that’s not where we’re going,” Jane said.

“It’s not. Turn right at the next corner.”

He pointed to a self-storage facility on the north side of the street. “There’s a package waiting for us. A ladder to the stars.”

10

The clear heavens of the day have slipped behind blankets heavy with unspent rain to bed down for the night. In the southeast, as the sea of clouds rolls across the last quadrant of the sky, the moon is drowning.

La Cañada Flintridge, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, north and east of Los Angeles, offers a high-quality suburban lifestyle, neighborhoods of well-kept homes on tree-lined avenues. Strangely, the pavement is in need of considerable repair and the lampposts provide no light on the street where Ashok Rangnekar lives with his wife, Doris.

Charlie Weatherwax, missionary for the truth of random cruelty, is being driven by the second-in-command of his four-member crew, Mustafa al-Yamani. Because they are valued members of the Arcadian revolution, they have been assigned a luxury SUV, a Mercedes-Benz G550 Squared with a 4.0-liter 416-horsepower biturbo V8, which will go from zero to sixty miles per hour in 5.8 seconds, provided at the expense of the Department of Homeland Security, which is one of the agencies for which they hold valid credentials.

Mustafa is an ambitious thirty-two-year-old who intends one day to live in a mansion on Long Island Sound, in East Egg village, and be warmly welcomed by old-money society as one of their own. In the interest of remaking himself to fulfill his dream, he has petitioned Homeland Security to allow him to proceed in court to have his name changed to Tom Buchanan, but permission has not been granted, as the department is currently short of the number of employees with Arabic names that it needs to meet its multicultural quotas.

Charlie and Mustafa are adamantly not two of a kind, and yet they get along well. Charlie’s high-protein low-carb diet, augmented with eighty vitamin pills a day and regular drinks of Clean Green, is a Spartan regimen compared to Mustafa’s fondness for the richest French cuisine and his tendency to order two desserts with dinner. Charlie is six feet three and lean as a wolf, while Mustafa is five feet eight and as solid as a pit bull. Mustafa pursues only icy blue-eyed blondes, while Charlie will bed any good-looking woman as long as she likes a little pain and/or humiliation with her sex, which he is able to deliver in a most refined manner.

“What kind of deplorable neighborhood is this?” Mustafa asks with evident distaste. Although English is his second language, he has diligently bleached every trace of an accent from his speech. “They don’t remove the dead trees, and that lamppost looks as though it fell over months ago.”

Charlie says, “We’re at the extreme northern end of the valley, on the very edge of La Cañada. People who live here aren’t looking for downtown action.”

“Yes, well, if this Vikram fellow hacked millions of dollars from nine different government agencies, whatever is he doing in a place like this?”

“Perhaps,” Charlie said, “he thinks it’s the last place we’d ever look.”

“With all the money he tweaked out of the system, why would he choose to live with an uncle and aunt?”

“Maybe because he likes them.”

“They must be a wildly entertaining couple if he’s willing to settle in a backwater like this.”

Long in preparation for his ascendancy to the social heights of East Egg, Mustafa carries a cordless razor with which he freshens his shave every three or four hours, wears a cologne so subtle that one is not consciously aware of its scent, and sleeps every other night with whitening strips affixed to his teeth. A cosmetic surgeon has refashioned his proud Arabic nose into something Mustafa thinks British and suggestive of English blood in his family tree dating to the age of colonialism. The hair between the knuckles of his fingers has been removed by electrolysis, and his nails are at all times so well manicured that his hands resemble those of an exquisitely detailed mannequin.

Now those hands suddenly tighten on the steering wheel. Mustafa brakes almost to a full stop, so that behind them the headlights of the Cadillac Escalade, which carries three other agents on Charlie’s four-man team, flare brightly in the tailgate window of the G550. He points to a large white sign with black lettering. “What do you make of that?”

DANGER

PROCEED AT RISK

PAVEMENT FAULTS

SLIDE ZONE

“There were wildfires last summer and heavy rains this winter,” says Charlie. “Always a bad combination. Let’s have a look.”

Here and there a swath of pavement is missing, as if it’s been sloughed away by torrents of racing water, and in its place is a temporary rampart of compacted soil topped with gravel. At each of these points, the hillside to the right is a steep slope of raw earth perhaps inadequately restrained by a makeshift retaining wall of portable concrete barricades. Otherwise the pavement is either in decent condition or only fissured and potholed.

Some streetlamps are missing, others are fallen over, and all are dark. For the last few blocks, the residences have been only on the left side of the street, many with lights aglow. Now the houses are dark and without landscape lighting. Some are surrounded by recently erected chain-link fences bearing signs sternly warning against trespassing.

The seventh and last of the dark structures is the address at which they expect to find Ashok, Doris, and Vikram Rangnekar—aunt, uncle, and the nephew who is a fugitive from the law. It is an enormous residence on at least an acre, standing among live oaks, the style of its architecture not definable in the gloom. This property is also fenced with chain-link unsuitable to an upscale neighborhood. Beyond the gate, a Mercury Mountaineer is parked in the driveway.

When Charlie and Mustafa get out of the bespoke G550 Squared, soft sheet lightning flutters through the rumpled clouds, as though a bright winged legion above the pending storm is hastening to the Apocalypse. There is no thunder flowing in the wake of the flying flame, and the night is uncannily still, all wind deep in a pocket of the storm, waiting to be spent.

The three men from the Cadillac precede Charlie and Mustafa to the gate in the fence: Pete Abelard, Hans Holbein, Andy Serrano. Pete and Hans have cleared their sport coats from belt holsters, and each has a hand on the grip of his weapon, ready to draw and fire, although Vikram Rangnekar is not considered likely to be violent.

By the time Charlie follows the trio, a man has exited the Mountaineer in the driveway. He has come to the farther side of the gate, through which he is speaking to Andy Serrano, who has flashed his FBI badge rather than Homeland ID, because in spite of several unfortunate recent directors, the Bureau is still held in higher regard by the public than is Homeland. Andy is shining a flashlight on this fortysomething Latino, who seems neither in awe nor afraid, his stance relaxed and his face composed.

Because this Latino—Jesus Mendoza—appears unarmed and cooperative, Charlie moves to the gate and shows his badge and takes charge of the scene. As Mendoza swings open the barrier at Charlie’s demand, he denies knowing anyone named Rangnekar and insists that the owners of the property are Norman and Dodie Stein, who have been his employers for nearly twenty years. He is a full-time gardener and jack-of-all-trades.

On his smartphone, Charlie has photos of Ashok, Doris, and Vikram, which he shows to Mendoza.

“No, sir. Not him. Not her. No, sir, not him, either. I haven’t ever seen these people.”

According to Bureau investigators, Vikram Rangnekar formed a limited liability company, Smooth Operator Development, twenty-six months earlier. Two months thereafter, Smooth Operator formed a limited partnership called Chacha Ashok. Chacha is Hindi for uncle, specifically for an uncle who is your father’s brother. Sixteen months ago, Chacha Ashok, L.P., had purchased this residence in La Cañada Flintridge.

“This house,” Charlie assures Mendoza, “is on the property-tax rolls as owned by a limited partnership controlled by Vikram and Ashok Rangnekar. Ashok and Doris Rangnekar are also registered to vote in this district.”

“There is some terrible mistake, sir. I am sad to say you have been misled. But then I know nothing of taxes and voting. To me, politics seems like a sickness, and I own no house. Until two months ago, I lived here, in an apartment above the garage.”

Mendoza is polite, self-effacing, but he lacks one quality that Charlie most appreciates in citizens with whom he must interact in situations like this. Although Mendoza is humble, he is not meek. Humility is good; Charlie Weatherwax expects any subject of an interrogation to be no less than humble, but humility is not enough. In urgent cases like this, he never trusts an interrogee until he has reduced him all the way to meek submission.

He puts away his smartphone and looms over Jesus Mendoza, who is even two inches shorter than Mustafa al-Yamani. He makes a point of exaggerating the Spanish pronunciation of the man’s name, calling him Hey-Seuss, emphasis loud on the first syllable, as if he is calling out to the author who wrote How the Grinch Stole Christmas. “Hey-Seuss, is it? Listen to me, Hey-Seuss, and listen good. If you’re covering for Vikram Rangnekar, Hey-Seuss, I’ll bust your skinny ass and put you away in some shithole of a federal prison for ten years. We’re going to search this place from top to bottom, Hey-Seuss, and you will assist us without delay.”

Mendoza smiles and shrugs. “Of course. We know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully.”

As sheet lightning fluoroscopes the body of the impending storm and shadows like revealed malignancies briefly caper around Charlie, he senses that he has been rebuked. “Exactly what’s that supposed to mean?”

Instead of answering the question, Mendoza says, “Because of recent mudslides, the city has condemned the property. Mr. and Mrs. Stein are contesting the condemnation in court. Deep caissons can be installed, retaining walls built, the home saved. If the law will allow. Meanwhile, no one is permitted to live in the house.”

“So what are you doing here?” Charlie asks.

“Sir, you see, I can no longer garden or make repairs. I work the night to keep out vandals who might damage the house before it can be saved.”

“Do you think we will vandalize the place, Hey-Seuss?”

“No, sir. Of course not. You are the law. Come with me. I will show you there is no Rangnekar and never was.”

11

A flurry of light fanning through enfolded clouds. No thunder in the mute throat of the imminent storm. In the hard glare of the security lamps, row after row of identical storage units stood like sleek mausoleums in an automated graveyard for antiquated robots in a machine civilization with pretensions to an immortal soul.

The facility was quiet on this Friday night. An owl urgently queried them from some roost unseen.

When Vikram unlocked the door to his unit and rolled it up, the clatter echoed along the serviceway, suggesting to the owl that silence was safer.

Vikram switched on the light. Several cardboard cartons occupied a small portion of the storage space, with a hand truck to move them.

“A satellite dish 1.1 meters in diameter,” he said. “Transmitter, receiver, satellite modem, plus all the cables and gimcracks to install a VSAT system.”

“For what purpose?” Jane asked.

“To connect with the Internet via satellites through a series of Internet service providers, so we can go online from any point on the road, weather permitting, and switch then from one ISP account to another at the first indication someone is tracking our signal.”

“You can do that?”

“I can do that from a mobile platform.”

“What mobile platform?”

“I’m thinking a motor home.”

Jane indicated the cartons. “What did all this cost you?”

“Nada. Used my personal back doors. This gear was ostensibly ordered by the Department of Education, through its Office of Educational Research and Improvement, and express-shipped by the manufacturer to an elementary school in Las Vegas. The school has been closed for two years. My cousin Harshad camped out on its doorstep, waiting for the FedEx delivery, and then he brought this equipment here, as we prearranged.”

The care Vikram had taken to acquire the equipment and his talk of using multiple Internet service providers began to suggest to Jane the shape of his intentions. “Have you already set up several accounts with satellite ISPs?”

“More than several. Thirty-six. One is held by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, another by the Fish and Wildlife Service, another by the United States Mint, another—”

“I get it,” she said. “No one in these agencies is aware of these ISP accounts.”

“They’re shadow-booked. And only I have the password that’ll activate them.”

During the weeks that she’d been consumed by this crusade, Jane had endured many moments when ultimate triumph seemed impossible, but she’d never grown despondent. Despondency drained your energy, made every effort seem useless; it led to despair, and those who surrendered to despair were committing themselves to failure and perhaps to death. Her precious child was a lamp in this dark world, and she owed him confidence, energy, determination; she owed him everything. For all the times that triumph had felt beyond her grasp, there had been comparatively few moments when hope had been more than a pilot light, when it had burned at full flame in her heart. But now, for the second time in an hour, she felt as if the world was bright with promise; belief and trust unified within her mind and heart, so she knew that special purity of hope called faith—faith that she’d succeed, that her enemies would fail.

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